US consumer spending rose by a measly 0.1% in February, it’s slowest rate of growth in over a year.

Spending, which accounts for 70% of the US economy, may be technically up, but the the lack of real growth is likely to weigh heavily on investor sentiment.

Record falls in home prices, job losses and sky-high energy costs mean Americans are doing the unthinkable: they’re cutting back on spending.

Is this a once-in-a-generation chance to buy financials? Are they as cheap as they are going to get? Is all the recent selling a kind of irrational excess?

“Those who call the action in financials ‘irrational excess’ show a distinct poverty of imagination, or rational poverty,” says Dan Denning in The Daily Reckoning Australia.

“Your once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity is a-once-in-human-history collapse of the financial system responsible for the last 200 years of global growth.”