Historical HPI (housing price index) - trends show an improvement.

As seen from this graph generated from yahoo finance, the housing prices have been improving steadily indicating a healthy overall recovery for the housing market.

Nations with the largest total GDP as measured from 2010.

Nations with the highest per capita GDP - translating into few of the countries with the best human development index (HDI)

Brilliant post on US news.

A recent article on NPR featured a discussion on the usage of different forms of money for purchases. The article was actually talking about the single factory which prints all the paper required for bills, but what was really interesting was the distribution of how the current money (bills) are spent and if they will be used as much in the future:

Different forms of money and their current and projected usage.  Comparison debit, credit cards, and checks with cash.

Recently Gallup ran an article on the 4 year emotional  health of the american population. The main result from the article was:

Emotional health index of the american population over 4 years. I could not help but notice this correlation with the performance of the market marked by the S & P over the past 4 yrs:

Performance of the S&P index over a 5 year period.

It can be seen by the comparison above that money or financial health does have a correlation  with the overall emotional well being of the population.