Economic growth came in well below expectations this morning, at 0.1 percent instead of the 1.2 percent generally expected. Ouch. Is this something we should be worrying about?

I’m at the airport on my way to the Commonwealth President’s Club conference, so this will be a brief post. As I’ve written many times before, I love these conferences for a bunch of reasons—the venues, the events, and, most of all, the people.

You can spend all day, every day, looking at and analyzing the plethora of economic and market data. I know, because that’s pretty much what I do. What you find after a while, though, is that much of this information is either redundant or meaningless (or apt to be revised so much that it might as well be).

Consumer confidence will play an increasingly important role in supporting stock prices as earnings show signs of rolling over.

Today’s post is inspired by Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai that depicts the same scene from various perspectives, yielding very different images. Data can be viewed the same way, with various angles giving different impressions and potentially leading to very distinct conclusions.

The headline for this morning is that new home sales are down more than 14 percent on a month-to-month basis. This comes in tandem with drops in mortgage applications and a much smaller drop, of less than 1 percent, in existing home sales. With rates up, and demand potentially declining as institutional buyers pull back, is it time to worry that the housing recovery is over?

My son, Jackson, is almost six, and we are starting to have conversations about what Daddy does for work. Since he is also at the age where we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about good guys versus bad guys—particularly in the context of Star Wars—this also tends to bleed over into other areas. So, of course, it got me thinking about where we, as an industry, stand.

This is the last installment in our series on rising interest rates. Here, we’ll cover what everyone really wants to know: What do rising rates mean for our investments?

Yesterday, we discussed what the natural rate of interest should be, arriving at about 5 percent on a nominal basis, assuming 2-percent inflation. That seems like a reasonable number over time, given that the Federal Reserve has committed to an inflation target of 2 percent. But with interest rates currently at much less than 3 percent, there’s clearly a gap between what the rate should be and where it is now.

For some reason, we are experiencing a new wave of doom and gloom. In the past week, I’ve been forwarded several e-mails rehashing end-of-the-world stories, including an invitation to watch a video entitled Meltdown America. When I was interviewed on TV yesterday, the clear theme of the questions was whether this was it, the big crash.