I went away this weekend and didn’t do much reading.

Traveling and speaking to actual people every so often is a good thing when you are looking for perspective. As I’moften introduced by friends to new people as "Phil the stock guy," I tend to get into a lot of interesting conversations about people’s jobs, the economy, their investments (including their homes), outlook… etc.. It’s kind of like being a doctor, where everyone wants to tell your their medical status as soon as they meet you. This is a good thing actually, as I love to get "real" information to offset the mountains of anonymous statisticaldata that we usually have to wade through.

I was down in DC, where most people still have jobs and retired people have insanely generous government pensions so I wouldn’t call them typical but there is a lot of optimism that things are really getting better and will continue to do so this year. On the way down there, I was reading a horrific article in the NY Times on the foreclosure rates in our region so I was in a pretty bad mood when I got to our nation’s capital but I was very impressed with the "can do" attitude of my political pals, who couldn’t hang out on Sunday because they had to work. I haven’t seen government employees work on a weekend since just after 9/11 but I will tell you that people in DC are busting their butts to get things done with a motivation I haven’t seen since Clinton took office.

Whether it will be "Yes they can" or "No, they are deluded" remains to be seen. Barry Rhitholtz did a nice, negative overview of the NYTimes article so I won’t go into it here and the map below is really horrific but an optimist would say that 98% of the people still have their homes and, even if the worst is not over, it’s certainly not as bad as the doom and gloom crowd is painting it. In the Great Depression, 25% of the people lost their jobs and, in 1934, nearly 1/2 of all US urban home mortgages were delinquent as US personal income dropped 44% over 5 years. THAT’S A DEPRESSION. The only reason the talking heads on TV can get away with using the "D" word so often is that we, as a nation of viewers, are such poor students of…