Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, I do ... very slight, very faint, but I think you can point to a couple of hopeful things. Number one, in the housing market - and of course, that's key to everything, we have to get the housing market back on track - housing starts - that is, new construction - have actually been dropping faster than housing sales, so that suggests that in the near future, we will probably see those two come together, which we need to have done in order to have stability in the housing markets. Secondly, commodity prices - everything from the price of gas to the price of oil, the price of some precious metals - seem to have bottomed out and are beginning to show some edging upward. I think that's important because it may show that there's a little bit more demand there, which is really the whole start of the economic supply chain. And then lastly there are some long-run indicators that are done by private sector forecasters that indicate that we have bottomed out, that those indicators are not pointing down. There's a little bit, very tiny, upward trend in them, so I think that might suggest some hope for an economic turnaround, however slight, toward the end of this year."