It's March 2009. The economy is as ugly as it's been since the 1930s. The nation's largest banks are on the brink of nationalization. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are vanishing every month. The stock market is at its lowest level since the mid-1990s.
But I'm sitting in a mall in Los Angeles and I can't believe my eyes. The place is packed. It hardly looks different from two years before, when the economy peaked. And people weren't just looking. They were buying. More than that, they looked confident. It was visibly different from the weeks and months prior when even Los Angeles' consumers, practically allergic to not spending money, went into hibernation.
True story: I asked a store clerk whether she noticed a change. "Yes," she said. "I think people just got tired of worrying all the time. They want to get on with it."
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