Unless you plan on buying the winning ticket in Friday’s $270 million mega-millions jackpot, you, and probably most people in the country, will continue to be on the front-lines of the economic quakes ahead. Every time I write about the economic nastiness brewing, I always say this: for most Americans, it’s been bad times for a long time. You can’t go through a couple of decades of mediocre wage increases–and, in many cases, no wage increases or even cuts–, or disappearing health care, or rising costs of health care, or the evaporation of real pensions (as one cartoon character put it, "My 401(k) feels like a 201(k)") or…well, fill in your own blank.

    But, today’s news is nothing to ignore. From The Wall Street Journal’s website, based on information just released:

U.S. consumer prices accelerated across the board last month, a worrisome sign for Federal Reserve officials who must balance a sharp slowdown in economic activity with stubbornly elevated price pressures.

Meanwhile, home construction rose in January, but the increase was slight and a sign of future groundbreakings fell to the lowest point in 16 years, suggesting more pain ahead for the housing sector.

Still, the inflation data likely won’t deter Fed officials from lowering official interest rates again next month, as guarding against recessionary risks remains their top priority. But the figures could limit the size of future rate cuts as the Fed struggles to maintain the public’s confidence that it will keep inflation under wraps.

    That has the stock market in decline, as a broad sell-off is underway because of the inflation news:

The precarious state of the U.S. economy has also wracked investors’ nerves and made sellers more aggressive in recent trading sessions.

"The market is adjusting to a lot of stress right now," said Alan Gayle, senior investment strategist at Trusco Capital Management in Richmond, Va.

He added that turmoil in the markets for houses and credit securities is also adding to the strain on stocks, a problem that has bedeviled investors for months. "It seems like every credit rock you turn over these days has something crawl out from underneath it. This is something that has been lingering longer than we expected."

    Dude, I got news for you–the "market", that mythical little beast, is the last in line to adjust to a lot of stress since you’ve had millions of real people trying to do that for a hell of a long time.

    And it will get uglier. When oil topped $100 a barrel yesterday (it has slid back to just under $99 a barrel today), it was another indicator that the individual person’s pocketbook is going to continue to be strained by high energy costs. Throw in more troubles in the credit markets:

Credit Suisse shook the markets on Tuesday when it announced that pricing errors by traders on asset-backed securities would result in write-downs of $2.85 billion.

The write-downs, which will knock $1 billion from first-quarter earnings, come a week after Credit Suisse announced fourth-quarter results that indicated that it had been relatively unscathed by the turmoil in the credit markets and had limited exposure to the subprime crisis, which has caused large losses at other banks.

    And, then, mix in assorted job cuts news that seem to be cropping up like this one, reported in today’s Wall Street Journal:

GMAC LLC will close a majority of its auto-financing offices in the U.S. and Canada this year and cut nearly 1,000 jobs as the lending company battles to shave costs in the face of falling auto-lending profits, higher borrowing costs and a tightening in access to consumer credit.

GMAC posted a $2.3 billion loss last year, as $4.3 billion in red ink accumulated at its mortgage arm, known as ResCap, more than offset a $1.24 billion profit made in auto-lending operations, which will remain at its core. The company spent much of 2007 setting restructuring actions in motion at ResCap, including job cuts and a complete overhaul of the business model. ResCap, like many financial firms, was hit hard due to an overexposure to subprime mortgages.

    Just doesn’t smell good. And, yet, the rich get richer…ain’t this a great country?