Is anyone getting depressed by all this? I'm starting to feel physically sick whenever I read about the economy. I think maybe I need to stop reading the news for a while. I felt the same way after 9/11.
1) During an election year, everybody thinks the economy sucks. So there is a bias there to consider, even though there are honest-to-god issues here.
2) We still make things people want, to put it in hacker terms. Movies, games, ideas, businesses. Yes, we've moved up from manufacturing to services and ideas, but we still make a lot of things a lot of people want. That's not changing.
3) Wall Street "blows up" about every ten years or so. Our system is not a magic forumula, so there are always loopholes. Smart people will always play into these loopholes until the system becomes unstable. At this point we fix the holes and keep going. The trick is to just fix the part that is broken and not try to outsmart the market, which you can't do. That's tough for politicians to do.
Long term? We live in a society where politicians get elected making promises (or wars) that nobody has to pay for. That keeps the voters voting, but it will cause our credit to self-destruct, probably in our lifetime.
But even then, life goes on. The fundamentals remain sound, ie, we're really good at making stuff other people will pay us for. As long as the fundamentals remain sound, and as long as your personal fundamentals remain sound (you are good at doing something people will pay you for) then we're just going to keep muddling through it all. The world is not ending.
