US retailers might be keeping their fingers today for Black Friday, traditionally the big shopping day of the year where people queue up for gift items and there are plenty of door-buster discounts. But concerns, reported here, are running high that it's going to be very bad this year. With layoffs everywhere and unemployment, people simply aren't in the mood to shop until they drop.

Worse still, shopping malls are being hit hard by the US housing meltdown and crumbling economy with retailers calling it quits, not even waiting for Christmas, and shopping centre owners struggling to fill the vacancies. As Roger Vincent and David Pierson write in the Los Angeles Times: "For property owners, the loss of tenants means more than a reduction in the revenue that is collected from rents. If one store closes, customers are less attracted to the center overall, and the losses can snowball. Whereas in previous years it was easy to find new tenants, now they are scarce. And as the property owners find themselves getting in trouble, their typical recourses - to sell the building or refinance it - are also stymied by the stuck economy."

As Matt Apuzzo from Associated Press notes that companies have survived plenty of downturns, but this one is different. In the old days, a business would get into trouble and then sit down with the bank to refinance the loan. But what makes this one different is that the banks don't actually hold the loan. The loans were packaged up into mortgages and sold to pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds as an investment. And now the losses are bringing the system crashing down. And with banks refusing to finance, shopping centres will go into foreclosure and nobody will buy them because banks won't write mortgages as long as investors won't purchase them.