My father was a Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee, and as a result had a very unusual perspective about the cycles of the economy. The better the economy, the fewer the bankruptcy filings, and vice versa; when work was slow, he used to joke that I didn't have to worry, hard times were going to come eventually. There is of course nothing funny about the events of the past two weeks; the consequence of the market crashing, and to a lesser extent the media's rediscovery of the "bidness" dealings of the Prez and Dick, will not just mean that people are going to lose a bit of their I.R.A.'s (two excellent takes on this can be found here and here). Over the next couple of years, companies will have less money to reinvest, and productivity and employment will shrink accordingly. After the accounting scandals and the ponzi schemes that many big corporations have been engaged in, ordinary investors are not going to return enthusiastically to the stock market any time soon. In all likelihood, we are going to see one bitch of a recession by 2004.