With the start of third-quarter earnings reporting arrival up, investors will soon be shifting their attention from Wall Street to Main Street

by David Bogoslaw

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Even to the degree that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continue to make the case on Capitol Hill for a speedy delivery of a colossal bailout package by reason of the troubled financial sedulousness, questions about the near-term prospects according to the broader U.S. economy be in great plenty. The ongoing drama has tended to obscure more of the other pressing issues for the economy. But through the start of third-quarter proceeds reporting become seasoned just one week away, it won’t be long before investors start to wile their attention from the latest Wall Street debacle to the ongoing challenges faced through Main Street.

The two realms of economic activity are linked of course, but the government’s historic actions these past two weeks require all but eclipsed what had been driving the markets until recently: concerns over anemic consumer spending and rising unemployment. To the extent that strength in the U.S. economy has been led through robust exports—a byproduct of a seven-year decline in the dollar—a $700 billion bailout fund or whatever volume the Troubled Asset Relief Program turns out to be could be just the thing to ensure the U.S. continues to stave off a technical recession, since everyone seems to agree the added national transgression would further hobble the greenback.

Consider this: Of the 3.3% growth reported during U.S. gross domestic product in the second billet, 3.1% came from exports. Although the resurgence in the strength of the dollar since early August until last week has helped tame commodity prices, which may boost consumer spending, the loss of the competitive favorable opportunity in world trade provided by a weaker U.S. currency may more than offset those gains and dramatically slow the economy’s expansion.

It may have being useful to zero in on a diverse group of industries and their prospects. Here, BusinessWeek takes a look at more of the bellwether groups that may offer some clues as to in what condition the good husbandry will perform as we head into the homestretch of 2008.

One of the strongest commodity exported sectors has been technology, with non-U.S. markets generating being of the class who much viewed like one-third of total revenues for some software manufacturers. Some observers believe that technology companies will continue to do well divisible by two if the global economic sink deepens for the reason that foreign governments and businesses can’t afford not to keep upgrading their systems and processes. Others see weaker economic conditions drying up businesses’ investment in denunciation technology.

Oracle (ORCL), seen as a leading indicator of the fortunes of enterprise software manufacturers, recently declared it aphorism in no degree weakness for the third cut to pieces and that its issue pipeline is robust, according to Richard Williams, a software analyst at bold research firm Cross Research in Livingston, N.J. But when he took a deeper look at the company’s numbers, Williams says he saw some signs of decelerating business activity, most notably in database support and update lines, or the sustenance service and patches customers purchase to take advantage of product improvements.

"Oracle has been surprisingly weak in database applications during two quarters in a row," he says. "That’s not something off-the-cuff I’d think customers would economize on." That could be an at daybreak indicator of weakness in larger companies since Oracle sells in a primary manner to large, high-end and midsize companies round the world, he adds.