The number you're typically looking for is "debt to GDP ratio." The number that starts to make economists shit their pants is 100%. However, they're basing that largely on numerology and bad excel spreadsheets. The "consumer confidence level" is a funny one. It's not measuring "how is the economy doing" it's measuring "how do you THINK the economy is doing". Presume all 5,000 surveyed work for the Fed. Your consumer confidence interval is likely an accurate measure of... well, how well current market conditions align with their personal economic philosophy. It's never going to be a great estimate of what's going on - it's a great estimate of what the country thinks is going on. I mean, the news tells you every time the S&P closes half a point higher. Companies are topping a trillion dollars in market cap. Jeff Bezos has a fuckin' spaceship and Elon Musk is banging Grimes. Of COURSE the country's doing great! As Trump promised, we're getting sick of winning. And if you, personally, are in the shit that means it's you, not the economy. Remember - about half of the same people asked about the economy think Obama is a secret muslim. A number of economic pundits have been throwing about the phrase "debt jubiliee" since 2009 or so. Their argument is that everything will be fine so long as we "forgive a bunch of debt." Sounds lovely. It also means "cut entitlements". It also means "renege on pensions and social programs." It's funny how by using the phrase "jubilee" you can feel fine about taking away grandma's cat food. By the bye, I didn't really understand Japan or what an asymptotic debt-to-GDP ratio looks like in practice. Then I read Showa. I now misunderstand it slightly less. You know what supports spending programs like that? Totalitarianism.
One of the reasons I'm behind on economics, and why I'm still continually wary of it, is exactly because of the coupling between human perception and economic conditions. I say "coupling", but the disconnect is important as well. Physics is so much more appealing to me than trying to understand anything to do with human behavior. People will tell you that the high-frequency trading automation is actually a layer of insulation between herd-mentality-driven sell offs (and buy ups too, I guess?). In a perfect world, with no bad actors looking to game the system, that might be true, but it was the lack of a perfect world that drove us to implement the high-frequency stuff in the first place. We can't save us from ourselves. Like you, I'm obviously convinced that the market is cyclical, but I've been worried about a crash for about four or five years. If I'm right, and we're three-ish years overdue for a downturn, I'm probably not gonna wanna say "I told you so" when the rally ends. There's a grad-student-run pub on campus. One night I'm out in the beer garden with my classmates, few drinks in, and a couple of young businessmen sit down, ask us a few questions, and offer us six figure jobs at Merrill Lynch to do quant shit. We laughed, thanked them, and left. It's not that I think all business and economic-sector jobs are evil, and I'm better than them. OK, no, sometimes that's part of it, but it's more about the fact that I have no interest in that sort of work. I would lose a major sense of purpose. I'm supposed to do science.
I took an interest in 2008 when I realized that the chucklefucks in business suits had dramatically impacted my life in 1987, 1999 and 2007. Having an economics professor hold up a 1,000,000DM bill from the Weimar and tell us that Alan Greenspan was the most important person in the world didn't help. I'll say this: recognizing that the economy is run not by people who are smart but by people who have had a run of luck gives you more tranquility around the Trump administration.