Baosteel Secures Plate Order for Qinzhou Refining Project

On a technical-glitch-filled conference call this morning or, Hillary Clinton and Wesley Clark talked about the general's endorsement of Clinton's presidential. Clark emphasized Clinton's preparedness -- "she's smart, does her homew k" -- and said, pointedly, "She'll be a commander-in-chief."

With Rudy and McCain accusing Hillary of being-military -- or at anti-Petraeus, the endorsement comes convenient However, Hillary didn't take the opportunity, provided by question from ABC's Kate Snow, to repudiate the ad or acknowledge existence. Snow asked if Clinton "agreed" with the, and she responded, "I've made respect for him [Petraeus] abundantly clear and I think speaks for itself." " with the, and she responded, I've made respect for him [Petraeus] abundantly clear"

But it is the downturn in sunny San Diego that poses the far bigger risk to the U.S. economy. Detroit, Cleveland some smaller Rust Belt cities are experiencing a traditional bust, in which economic woes spread to housing. San Diego, the housing decline seems to be a self-generated phenomenon, the product of too-high prices and too-crazy lending practices. Now the "housing market is dragging down the rest of the economy," says Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego. The same is true in and around Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami, Washington, New York City and Tampa, Fla.--all metro areas where house prices skyrocketed until 2006 and have since fallen in the face of otherwise positive economic news. Nationally, house prices dropped 3.2% in the 12 months ending in June, while the economy grew 1.9%.

For much of this year it was tempting to see this disconnect as a good thing: strength elsewhere was compens ating for the slowdown in housing. But when the Labor Department reported in September that job creation had lurched into reverse after four years of gains, the tune on Wall Street and elsewhere shifted abruptly. Economists began fretting that, for the first time, a real estate bust would throw the country into recession--a sustained period when the economy shrinks instead of grows and lots of people lose their jobs.