The biggest fly to be swatted so far by the struggling real estate market is the CEO of Merrill Lynch who finally stepped down on October 30th to clear way to a new path for Merrill Lynch. Stanley O’Neal had little choice after Merrill Lynch lost nearly $8 billion dollars during the third quarter of the 2007 calendar year.

It really doesn’t matter what industry you are in or how big your company is, if you are losing that much money with your business then obviously some changes are going to need to be made and heads are going to roll. There have already been changes in other leadership roles to help stop the bleeding that has been going on with the traditionally dominant company in the past. In this case it is starting from the top and will trickle down as Merrill Lynch looks to rebound after such a difficult struggle.

Apparently O’Neal pushed for a merger with Wachovia recently and that helped to accelerate he exit out of the door from the board members of Merrill Lynch. What is sad for companies like Merrill Lynch and their employees is that things do not look like there will get better for the subprime real estate market.

Companies like Wal-Mart are offering new gimmicks and even individual Christmas shops in order to help their sales during this holiday season. Many of the retail companies are concerned that you as a consumer are not going to buy more during the holiday season because of how terrible the real estate market has been and the general decline in the economy. It is expected that with Iraq the war will cost up to $2.4 Trillion dollars and people are generally becoming more and more fearful of losing money during this decline.

The National Retail Federation believes that growth will only be around 4% and not the larger 4.6% that happened last year. Now that might not seem like much to you, but understand that this is the biggest trade group and nearly 50% of the sales for retail companies comes during the holiday season.

Expect a lot more credit card offers with softer interest rates to help you spend easily during this holiday season to help companies like Wal-Mart thrive during this season.  Many companies have already prepped for this possible downfall of the real estate market by cutting prices and trying to establish more small market mentality like companies like Wal-Mart.  It looks like it will get worse economically in our country before it gets better.