After all the fireworks in the beginning of the month, August ended with a bit of a whimper on the one hand, but a bang on the other. I loved the headlines that spewed forth just minutes after the markets closed Thursday night: “U.S. stocks rise to close turbulent month,” followed by, “Major indexes drop for fourth straight month,” as well as, “Stocks gain, end worst month since ‘flash crash.'” Oh, and “S&P posts best eight-day gain since 2009.” Wow! I just didn’t have that eight-day record in my head, did you?

Of course, Thursday’s 1%-plus decline for the major market averages put an end to that.

The ups and downs of the headlines mimic the way the markets were moving in August as we had to contend with the debt-ceiling debate (or food fight), the S&P credit downgrade, a monster week of volatile market declines followed by a pretty good recovery, and daily volatility that saw the Dow swing from high to low and back by 2% or more on all but six of the month’s 23 trading days. Before August, we’d had only three such 2%-plus days in the first seven months of the year. Heck, on Aug. 9, the Dow went swinging more than 6%, or more than 662 points!

Consumer confidence (not surprisingly) stinks but, as I have said before, watch what consumers do, not what the surveys say they say they’re doing. For one thing, they’re spending money, apparently.

We also learned that Dillard’s (NYSE:DDS) and Ross Stores‘ (NASDAQ:ROST) same-store sales were up 4% in August. Target‘s (NYSE:TGT) were up 4.1%. Macy’s (NYSE:M) were up 5%. Limited‘s (NYSE:LTD) were up 11%. Gap (NYSE:GPS), on the other hand, was down 6%. But in general, retail sales were strong in August. Who knew?

Economic and market action provided further grist for the mill of a constantly churning Wall Street. The retailer’s numbers I just cited had the market in a tizzy, and when the ISM manufacturing number came in lower in August but higher than anticipated, the stock market went tearing higher until, once again, cooler heads began to take a look at the innards of the report. Despite a slight rebound in activity at the end of August, manufacturing, which has led this recovery, is not currently in great shape. The markets ratcheted down after that bit of rationalization came to the forefront.

So, where are we? Fed chief Ben Bernanke gave no clues or even hopes for further Fed action that might be thought of as QE3 or even QE2.5 when he last spoke. And while the data on incomes and spending in July looked good, we still have more data to come on what happened during the past month.

Unemployment remains a big problem, and it’s going to be the next big battleground as we’ve seen already just in the scheduling of next week’s presidential address to Congress on that topic. It’s worth noting that the White House announced Thursday that it estimates unemployment will go down a wee bit by year’s end to 8.8% and then to 8.2% by the end of 2012.

That’s hardly low, but it might simply be a case of the White House setting low expectations that it can then beat, much the way companies now seem to chronically underestimate future earnings.