Those who seek wisdom by staring at the data flowing by every day from financial markets have something in common with the ancient Indian philosophers who believed that certain rivers were sacred. Whether it’s stock market tickers or flowing water, the wise person looks at the same thing that you and I do, but what they may see is decidedly different.

What we're looking at right now is a little bit scary. The wobbling of stock prices, the decline of the U.S. dollar, and the increase in the price of gold are all telling us essentially the same thing. That is that the global love affair with the American economy is coming to an end.

That's not a complete surprise to some of us. Money from abroad, and even from home, for that matter, has often moved as a herd. And nations or continents which have been fortunate enough to draw ahead in the competition for capital have always fallen back in the past. But adjusting from the free spending of rapid expansion to the more careful growth allowed by more limited means is never painless.

Doubtless it will be that way for the U.S. economy as well. Already the insistent question of when the stock market will get back to "normal" is being answered quite convincingly by the market itself. The one step forward, two steps back movement of blue chip stocks in the last year is now normal, and we had better get used to it.

But it is not really all bad news. The swing in investor confidence in U.S. companies does not, by itself, represent a big enough drag to threaten the recovery in the overall economy. And a dose of stockholder skepticism, or even unrest, might be just the thing needed to help us regain our competitive edge.

On paper at least, the decline in aggregate valuation of the stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange over the last twelve months has destroyed more than $1.1 trillion in stockholder wealth. The fear of some is that this sizable hit on our collective net worth will cause us to put the brakes on our spending, sending the economy back down for the count.

But that hasn't happened yet, and it probably won't. The market has been giving most of us bad news since the tech bust of 2000, yet consumer spending has never failed to increase in the U.S. economy since then. That's because the variability of the market causes us to view some part of our losses -- as well as our gains -- as illusory. Since most of us are not planning to spend this money today, its fluctuations in value are only loosely associated with our perceived financial status.

The same cannot be said for business spending. With the spigot of fresh capital dramatically slammed shut, investment spending has been frozen in its tracks. That's been especially hard on the manufacturing-intensive Indiana economy, which depends on capital goods orders from other businesses for much of its livelihood.

But it may ultimately turn out to be a healthier thing for the economy as a whole. At the height of the dot-com mania, the willingness of investors to throw their dollars at anything that sounded promising lowered the cost of capital to virtually zero. In the sobering aftermath of that era, we find once-disdained concepts such as cash flow and profitability being dusted off and applied to justify new spending.

That gives us hope that the new discipline being forced on business to justify spending will cause wiser investments to be made. Which means, in turn, that our fall from grace in the eyes of global investors may ultimately be self-correcting.