Boy, just look at these headlines in the Reuters Business section today: CEO Confidence Hits Record Low; Oil Falls Nearly $2; Airlines Face Losses as Demand Falls; Wall Street Slumps on Earnings; GM Anxiety; Alcoa Shares Fall on Expectations of Losses; GM in “Intense” Bankruptcy Prep: Source, etc, etc, etc. All the last week’s confidence in the markets seems to have evaporated. Stock fell yesterday, and continued to fall today. Those who have said that we passed the darkest point of this deep recession are being drowned out by those who say “not so fast:” even if we do see signs of improvement, the economy will take years to right. Investors don’t believe they’ll be able to hang on to the gains stocks have made in the last couple weeks once companies’ first quarter earnings are reported. So, they are unloading the stocks today. The Dow, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ all lost over 2% of their value in the course of trading today. It’s against this background that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein raised his concern over… “Buy America” provisions in the stimulus? Blankfein was speaking at the Council of Institutional Investors’ spring conference in Washington, D.C. today when he raised the scariest thing of all—“protectionism.” Hmm…. funny, poor investment practices by firms like Goldman Sachs that forced them to accept government bailout funds, but made CEOs, like Mr. Blankfein himself very, very rich (to the tune of $67.9 million bonus in 2007 alone) did not seem to bother him as much.