Just so you know, the whole auto industry is in a tailspin.

All the auto manufacturers are seeing sales fall by more than 30%, with Chrysler falling by a whopping 53%, year-over-year.

My guess as to Chrysler is that the American public realizes on some unconscious level that Cerberus is a pump and dump operation that cannot be trusted.

In real estate, construction spending was down by 0.6% from October to November, which was better than the consensus estimate of 1.4%, which to my mind is a serious WTF number. 1.4% a month is Sta-Puft Marshmallow man time.

In central-bank land, we have reports that the Federal Reserve and the ECB are working together to avoid deflation, which indicates that central bankers on the both sides of the pond are scared.

The ECB’s only charter is to control inflation, but now they are trying to figure out how to get inflation back into their economies.

No surprise that we are still seeing a flight to safety that is driving the dollar up against both the Euro and Yen.

In energy, oil is up again, largely on concerns about the Middle East, and retail gasoline was up 1.4¢/gal, the 6th straight day in a row, which seems to indicate that gas prices will be rising in the near future.

Finally, here is a pretty picture:

It’s a measure of the ISM Manufacturing index (I mentioned this last week). The graph is courtesy of The Bonddad Blog, and he accurately describes this as “cliff diving”.