Understatement of the Week: Chris Deane

Just checking: The obvious still counts as an understatement, does it not?

Anyway, this is a story of the rich, the very rich and the not so rich:

After a week in which the stock market deflated, bounced back, collapsed and recovered from Monday to Friday -- with trillions of dollars of on-paper wealth vanishing during the week -- a shopper headed into a Louis Vuitton store in Beverly Hills, Calif., said, "if it [the market] really does crash, then yes, we'll change our spending."

Good point.

Then there's this self-explanatory quote from billionaire Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after years of fighting tax hikes for the wealthy.

This past week, under orders from the European Central Bank, Berlusconi steered his Cabinet into agreeing to a $65 billion austerity plan, including spending cuts and tax hikes for Italians earning more than $128,000.

"Our heart bleeds to have to do this, we who bragged never to put our hands in the pockets of Italians," Berlusconi said.

In a report on construction trades in The Boston Globe Saturday, an article quoted ironworker Chris Deane, a member of a struggling fraternity of construction workers in the Boston area: "Everybody says, 'The work is coming, the work is coming,' but I can't call the mortgage company and say, 'Oh, the work's coming,'" he said.