Room for cautious optimism ? U.S. stocks stable as Europe and Asia continue decline Stock markets fell sharply across most of Asia again and continued to decline in Europe after Tuesday's global dive. Stocks in New York showed some tentative signs of recovery. ################################### Duh? What's the big deal? Unworriedinvestors are buying again in Shanghai SHANGHAI: Seated before a row of computer terminals flickering with stock charts in a large brokerage house in this bustling city's downtown area, Li Ruichang insists he is not too worried about China's massive stock sell-off Tuesday. "Things like that happen," Li, a 63- year-old engineer, said Wednesday. "But I'm not worried about a crash. After a five-year long bear market, the bull market shouldn't end that fast." Li is a speculator. The Chinese stock market, he says, is like a casino or perhaps even a government-rigged slot machine. But you can still make money betting on the market here. ########################################### Full-blownU.S. recession is still seen as unlikely Excerpt: The economic news certainly isn't all bad. The housing problems still haven't turned into a crisis, thanks in part to interest rates that are still not high by historical standards. So the most likely situation is not a full-blown recession. The forecasters at the Economic Cycle Research Institute in New York, who have accurately predicted each of the last three U.S. recessions, argue that the current slowdown won't amount to much more than a lull. By the middle of the year, they say, low interest rates and healthy corporate spending will have the economy growing nicely once again. Lakshman Achuthan, the institute's managing director, said Tuesday that he thought the odds of a recession over the next year were less than 20 percent. Shepherdson, the chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, who's more bearish than most forecasters right now, still puts the odds at only 30 percent. But for all the attention that formal recessions get on Wall Street, they are not really the benchmark that matter to most people. A significant slowdown that falls short of a recession can do a lot of damage to stock prices, profits and wages. Only in the last few months, for example, has the current expansion grown strong enough to give most American workers pay raises that outpace inflation. Those raises would be endangered if the economy were to slow from last year's growth rate of 3.4 percent to even 2 percent.