Not sure how many folks who'll be on the FastCompany community pay
attention to the Economic indicators but I'd suggest it'd be very much
worth your while to pay a fair amount. Part of the problem is that just
going by the headlines can be very mis-leading. For one thing the
headlines are just about the most recent data point and don't tell you
what the trend is - which is more valuable. And since many of the data
series reported on are very noisy because of period-to-period
fluctuations it's easy to get lost in the noise. We can cure almost all
of those problems by looking at the trends in real, inflation-adjusted,
economic data on a Year-over-Year (YoY) basis. And when we do that we
get a further benefit that the trends, structural relationships,
timing/lags and change points start to pop out at you. For somore more
on this I can't recommend highly enough Joseph Ellis' book
"Ahead-of-the-Curve". His web site with charts is here.

US GDP, Consumption & Employment Chart (not permitted to upload and post apparantly)

Hopefully (mechanics are challenging here - especially response
time) you can see the chart and we can use it to make these points. If
the chart isn't visible try here.Total
output of the economy is GDP and 70% of it is Consumption (PCE for
Personal Consumption Expenditures). Future demand depends on several
things but a key one is Employment. In the chart you can see the YoY%
changes in each since 1994. Notice that we're in a slowmotion slowdown
in GDP but Consumption has begun to tip over rather rapidly and
Employment is really hurting. The fundamental answer to the title
question is, "Dude, it's coming unless we get real lucky". So all brace
for heavy weather.

Real Retail Sales Chart (not permitted to upload and post apparantly)

Just to put another point on it, if it works, everybody got all
excited because Retail Sales - which is an early and high-frequency
indicator, was up because of the government stimulus checks. When you
back out Gasoline and look at Real Retail Sales we've been experiencing
negative growth though; and the rate of decline is increasing.

And if you want to dig into the real data in more depth and see the
big and little pictures try this recent series of posts on my main
blog. Starting with this one which'll read you into things fairly
quickly: Economic Outlook: Demand Declines, Bad News, & Wealth. And to really dig in here you go:

Business Cycle Status and Outlook:

• The Great Circle: Where We're At in the Business Cyle
• Real GDP: How Good are the Numbers ?
• Crossing the Ripping Point: Breaking Down GDP Components

High-Frequency Indicators:

• Economic Dashboard: Current High-Frequency Indicators

• Current Economic Outlook: HF Indicators vs the Business Cycle
• Behind the Misperception Veil: What's that Data Behind the Curtain ?
• HF Indicators (Sales, Rates, Money, Inflation, Oil, Dollar): Unscheduled Interruption