Dave Kansas is president of FiLife, a personal-finance joint venture between Dow Jones and IAC Corp. Previously, Kansas was editor of the Wall Street Journal's Money & Investing section and author of The Wall Street Journal's Complete Money & Investing Guidebook.

We have hit the bottom of a business cycle before and this is what it feels like. Not good, but not the end of the world. Business will pick up, but how soon? Depends whether you take the Japanese or the Swedish view of things.