Thomas Church sits on this shopping center bench in suburban northwest Baltimore as though he might claim squatter’s rights. He says he’s been sitting here all day long. It is now 4:30 in the afternoon. Church has time to kill. In the sputtering American economy, he’s between jobs at the moment, but he hopes the moment won’t last too long. He is 79 years old.

The stock market soars 900 points one day and sinks about 80 the next. Church watches this from a distance both financial and psychological. He says he’s never owned a stock in his life. But he always had steady work, and he retired thinking he’d be OK, and now the plummeting economy and the rising cost of health care and food and fuel tell him otherwise.