It’s interesting reading about all the people who are saying they saw the current economic crisis coming long before anyone else did. Anyone who says ‘They saw it coming’, I generally on principle don’t believe. Unless they were smart enough to squirrel away there money and turned some kind of profit or at least made no loss as everything else crashed and burned.

But that said, this little quote from Sony caught my eye.

Sony knew the economy was going to hell back in February. How? Camcorder sales fell like a rock. Camcorders are the proverbial canary in the coal mine, plunging before everything else. (All of their vast historical data over the last few recessions back this up.) It?s because, Vandenbree says, there?s ?nothing more discretionary than camcorders,? so it?s the first to go when consumers feel a crunch, making it an early warning sign.

? Gizmodo quoting Jay Vandenbree, president of Sony Electronics Consumer Sales