In terms of the economy, are we any better off than in Sept of 2006?
nostrademons: If we could answer this with any degree of certainty, we'd all be rich. ;-)I think there're some areas that we're better off in.  Banks are no longer making those crazy subprime loans.  People are saving again.  A lot of the "walking dead" companies that were going to go bankrupt have gone bankrupt.  Lame web startups that are nothing but Rails or Django frontends aren't getting started.  Pretty cool web startups that actually take use of some technology enablers (say, cloud computing and mobile) are getting started.In other areas, we're worse off.  Now, people aren't just losing their houses because they should never have bought them, they're losing them because they lost their jobs.  There's a shitload of extra money out there that's bound to come out as inflation sometime.  The government has added something like $2T of extra debt.  We've lost the confidence of the international community, who we need to finance our debt.  The government has basically blown its wad as far as fiscal and monetary stimulus goes.So I dunno.  A lot of the excesses that led to this have been trimmed, but things are so much more fragile now that it takes a lot less to set us off on a downward spiral.