As we start moving further into May, I think it’s a good time to take a look back at April’s economic news, plus what to expect in the month ahead.

A reader asked the other day, simply, whether I was worried about the debt. As I was considering a response, I realized it was going to be a long one and that I had not written about this issue for quite a while. So, here we are.

As we move away from the financial crisis and as policies normalize, it is a good time to take a look at what the removal of those policies might mean. After all, many of the actions taken in the aftermath of the crisis were explicitly designed to do certain things. If those actions were successful, then presumably their reversal would have the opposite effect.

We closed yesterday’s post on the stock market and your portfolio with the proposition that future returns, historically, have been lower when the market started out expensive than when the market started out cheap. This would seem to be common sense, but there is considerable resistance to the idea. Let’s think it through by starting with a look at the actual numbers.

We closed yesterday’s post on market turbulence with the big picture: risks are rising, but they are still not necessarily immediate. Of course, this is important to remember. But it also implicitly assumes that, as investors, we are primarily concerned with that short-term risk. In fact, what we should be looking at is how our portfolios are likely to play out over years and decades, not the next couple of quarters. With that in mind, what can we discern from current conditions about the longer-term impact?

Yesterday, we had another breakdown in the stock market. Major indices dropped for the third day out of four, and they were down this morning. Once again, we are getting close to the long-term trend line, the 200-day moving average, which is where I personally start to pay attention.

Normally, I don’t spend my time watching the markets move. But this morning, I did have one chart open: the interest rate on the U.S. Treasury 10-year. In the past couple of days, the rate has risen. The question is, will it actually get to 3 percent? If so, what will that mean?

Today’s post will conclude this week’s discussion on the major economic risk indicators I follow. After looking at interest rates and jobs, we will close with a discussion of confidence, both consumer and business.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s look at the yield curve, today we will review employment, another indicator that does a good job of signaling economic risk. The reason employment works as an indicator is simple: More than 70 percent of the economy is made up of consumer spending, and the vast majority of that spending comes from wage income—which is to say, from jobs. No jobs? No spending. No spending? No economy. It really is that simple.

One of the key indicators I look at when evaluating economic and market risks is the yield curve, which is a fancy name for how interest rates for different time periods vary. You would expect the rate an investor needs for a 10-year loan, for example, to be different from what she needs for a 3-month—or 30-year—loan. And, by and large, that is the case. Exactly how different the rates are, however, can change quite a bit, and those changes can tell us a lot about the economy.