Did you ever have such a good night that you felt you had some kind of comeuppance coming to you in the morning? Or had such a string of good luck -- in both love and cards -- that you just knew you were riding for a fall?

Not that everyone has enjoyed such a great ride--see rising income disparities, disproportionate executive bonuses, etc.--but we've been riding pretty high since 2002. Inflation has remained tame while productivity continued to rise and the housing market, well, the housing market...

Now the good times have come home to roost. Or so we're told. And maybe that's exactly the trouble. Economists talk about deficits, trade gaps (looming and otherwise) and the imbalance of rents to mortgages--and sometimes, we listen too closely for our own good. After all, technology is still making us productive and we're still creating wealth.

But they're talking and we're listening. They started talking up that mortgage crisis business--but why should we care if a posse of banks takes a bath on a bunch of bad loans? That's the business they're in. If they don't want it to happen again, they should buy some risk-assessment software.

In the meantime, we should focus on what we can actually accomplish and not get carried away by markets we can't control or caught up in trying to outrun economic trends shaped by supra-national financial institutions.