Thomas Oliver is a business columnist for AJC Sunday. He can be reached at toliver.writeright@gmail.com

If all you paid attention to were the Dow Jones index and the unemployment rate, you would be justifiably confused. The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street has rarely been greater.I asked a few economists what indicators they look at for clues beyond the headlines.

Thomas J. Stanley doesn’t believe we’ve learned our lesson.The Atlanta author, former Georgia State professor and expert on the wealthy writes in his new book that once the fear recedes, we’ll go right back to spending like the shopoholics we are.That might be good news for our economy, which is so dependent on consuming spending.

You know things are awful when Washington politicians seem genuinely concerned about small business, rather than simply spouting the usual platitudes toward an amorphous group that typically lacks the political muscle of Wall Street or unions.Within the last week, head honchos from the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffett himself have expressed concern that small business isn’t responding as needed.

To understand why Georgia has lost more banks than any other state during this recession, you need to understand why we had so many to begin with. And why so many seemed addicted to real estate.Or, as Doug Williams, chief executive of Atlantic Capital Bank, says: “We are where we are because of who we were.

If you thought the debate about health care was surreal, then don’t throw away those 3-D glasses, because you’ll need them to have any shot at understanding the cap and trade bills now making their way through the corridors of Congress.When David Ratcliffe says the result could be awful, you need to know how understated the chief executive of the Southern Co.

To understand why Georgia has lost more banks than any other state during this recession, you need to understand why we had so many to begin with. And why so many seemed addicted to real estate. Or, as Doug Williams, chief executive of Atlantic Capital Bank, says: “We are where we are because of who we were.

You want to believe that things are getting better.That the partial restoration of your 401 (k) was based on reality and not just another bubble. You aren’t sure you can handle another bubble bursting, but you’ve been suspicious for some time that the market’s rise wasn’t sustainable.

When the newly named executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority looks out on the Savannah River as two tugboats dock a ship from Asia, he imagines a line from Chicago to Dallas.Curtis J. Foltz notes that 80 percent of the U.S. population lives east of that line.

The Senate Finance Committee must be participating in a prison rehabilitation program. It obviously has a former Enron accountant dummying up the Baucus health care bill, which has enough phony accounting procedures to get someone in the private sector sent to jail.

Talk to mortgage bankers, brokers and housing experts and you’ll be hard pressed to find one who suggests letting the first-time homebuyers’ tax credit expire.They are unanimous in saying the $8,000 credit has helped, though they differ on how much.They are equally unanimous in saying that metro Atlanta’s housing market has finally stabilized.

What a week.Home prices rose. Consumer confidence dropped. Personal spending took off. Mortgage rates dipped below 5 percent. And the stock market went all wobbly to start the fourth quarter.The some good, some bad, some contradictory reports are to be expected when the economy is at an inflection point, says Mercer University’s Roger Tutterow.

It’s been a year.Remember when we were watching the impossible take place?Our 401(k)s were getting mauled as the Panic of 2008 set in. We were already hurting by then, as we had been watching our investments decline since the previous autumn. We were in the 11th month of a bear market.

A jpeg of a poster resides on my computer’s desktop. The poster is of a firm handshake. The caption reads, “Consulting: If you aren’t part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”I didn’t find that joke in the just published “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong,” by Matthew Stewart.

As a unique way of noting the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Wall Street, a grand fight has broken out among economists, with fingers wagging in pointed essays, scholarly journals, blogs and national magazine pieces.Everyone blames each other for not predicting and therefore preventing the Great Recession and the Panic of 2008.

Atlanta Federal Reserve President Dennis Lockhart is a worried man. If he weren’t a worrier by nature, his job would have made him one.Two days before he took over the Atlanta Fed on March 1, 2007, he witnessed lightning strikes emanating from storm clouds that had been gathering across the country: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae announced they would no longer buy subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.

I don’t like this anymore than you do.But here goes: Despite our first positive report on housing prices in forever, the slide isn’t over.When the latest Case-Shiller Index revealed that prices of metro Atlanta homes increased from May to June — ending our two-year slide into oblivion — a collective sigh was heard from Buford to Jonesboro.

As consensus builds that the recession is over, some are crediting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s stewardship and all but re-nominating him by acclamation.But others worry that declaring the recession over is a tad premature.“I would be hesitant to declare the recession over while unemployment remains so dire,” said George Selgin, professor of economics at the Terry College of Business at UGA and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

We may have reached the bottom of our economic descent, but certain segments remain more like black holes that threaten what is likely to be at best an anemic recovery. The dirty bomb of commercial real estate hasn’t detonated yet, though many of us expected it by now.

What we believe to be true motivates our actions far more than any official proclamation of reality. It’s the old “perception is reality” maxim.We want to believe this is the bottom.We’re ready to dust ourselves off, ask who’s got the flashlight and hope the climb back up doesn’t set off an avalanche of loose rocks.

Let’s take a quick glimpse backward at a couple of recessions to see what might lie ahead in the way of recovery, as everyone seems to agree we have reached a bottom.Until this one, I’ve always considered the 1973-75 recession the worst.

The last time we were here, when we just had to do something, immediately, we passed a $787 billion spending bill that promised to stimulate the economy.We know better now. It hasn’t come close to living up to its billing and won’t anytime soon.

Mike Sullivan is typical of our small businessmen and women. He built a business, Southeast Sealing Inc., over the last 37 years that now employs 25. He’s brought his son, Michael, into the business. Along the way, he’s been an active member of his community, serving today as chair of the Rockdale Development Authority, while all along contributing to just about any charity that walked into his Conyers office.

Who knew we needed another missile treaty with the Russians?

"You've got to be kidding" is the howl being heard from mortgage brokers responding to the new underwriting rules.

If Hollywood made an action movie of the financial reform plan it would produce a story featuring a mysterious Regulator.

We are approaching the end of the second quarter, when, we've been told, we'll slide into the summer months where the grass is green, flowers bloom and breezes blow gently.

Incoming college freshmen beware: Credit card companies have until February to sign you up.

The new credit card law can't protect us from ourselves.Congress has created law where the Federal Reserve had created policy. The Fed's rules are to take effect July 2010. The politicians are rushing their version into place four months earlier.The real difference? Politicians get to claim they socked it to the big bad credit card companies.

It's the jobs, stupid.No matter where you go, what you hear about is jobs.Jobs lost to the recession. Jobs needed for recovery.How jobs are related to the housing crisis and the pending commercial real estate implosion.And, of course, the obvious connection between jobs and consumer spending.

You know times are tough when you are a successful 72-year-old businessman sleeping on a blowup mattress in an empty house.