Global PR honcho Mark Penn, who has advised the Clintons and Tony Blair, has a piece in The Wall Street Journal talking about what's supposedly the latest rage: mattress stuffing. According to Penn, it's come back with a vengeance in the wake of the financial meltdown. Baby boomers are now buying gold coins, sales of home safes and vaults are surging and sales of guns this year are up 8 to 10%, says Penn.

Then he claims cash is the new plastic. Penn writes: "Our own just-completed Holiday Spending Survey shows that most Americans are going to use more cash and charge less on their credit cards than in the past. Although most of us have lived in a plastic world so long we can barely remember people like my dad who carried around wads of bills, Americans are now seeing the first real dip in credit card sales in decades. Fear of credit and credit cards is a renewed emotion."

The part that annoys me about Penn's work is that he keeps drawing these long bows. He implies, for example, that the reason for the drop in credit cards is because people don't trust the financial world anymore. But a simpler, and more likely, explanation is that people just don't want to max out their cards. They can't afford to.

And does he really expect us to believe that people are buying guns because they think the ATMs are going to be break down. Or again, is there a simpler explanation? Isn't the recent increase in gun sales due to fears from gun enthusiasts that Congress and the incoming Obama administration will limit gun ownership?

Still, Penn's views are worth checking out. Even if it's only to get you thinking about what's really going on.