Not sure what to think. Individual investors may feel better, but we are a minority, and we certainly don't rock the markets. Most people, as mentioned above, are indeed worse off than they were before the recession/depression or whatever you want to call it, and most people don't have anything invested. Do consumers really feel better? Or are the top few % doing a larger proportion of the spending? Or are the ones who are less well off spending anyway to make themselves feel better and getting further into debt? What about the chronically lower labor participation rate? Maybe some of those people are doing some sort of gray market, unreported thing like cleaning people's houses or mowing their lawns for cash. Or are there just a lot more people living off their family, holding people back from becoming generally better off than they were in 2007? Lots of questions and stuff that's hard to measure.