I work every day with people who have invested fairly heavily in the stock market; their moods change with the NASDAQ. I don't remember this kind of fixation on the economy among the people I grew up with. In West Texas, moods did change with the price of cotton and with the weather, but it seems like most people had a sense, probably well founded, that those things were very removed from the condition of the national economy, and were inherently cyclical. Smart farmers knew that good prices and good crops this year forboded at least bad prices next year.
So I'm not inclined to worry. There are lots and lots of little pockets of economic activity where you can have boom times in a bust year, or vice versa. We're going to be okay.
