But as a country we face rising economies elsewhere around the world—trading partners increasingly turned competitors—energy costs and above all a lack of political will to use government well.

The levee preventing the flood of recession, Dimon said, was employment. "We haven't seen big job losses yet," he said. "If I was going to keep my eye on one thing, that would be it."

To prevent such losses, he said, government needed to target new tax cuts at "lower-paid people" and at keep mortgages flowing to them. For the next six months to two years, we can't raise taxes, he said.

Government action is the key, Dimon said. To make his point, he asked the participants whether they were "pissed off" about the high price of gasoline at the pump. Most hands shot up.

"YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!" Dimon declared. "We almost deserve it," he said, because as a country we had dithered for decades rather than transforming our energy economy. "We knew about this in 1974!" he said. The crisis we face now is the result of a "lack of political will."

And so it went in the tent, and elsewhere. Even Carlos Gutierrez, the Bush administration's calmly optimistic Secretary of Commerce, took note of the tone—and the reality. The federal deficit is low as a percentage of the whole economy, he noted; unemployment is lower than the average of past decades. And yet the mood is somber.

The reason, he said, is that "everything is stalled" in Washington. No one there seems to be able to deal with, or reach an agreement on, the myriad problems we face, from energy to immigration to the future of tax policy. This situation can't last, he said, if we are to move forward as a country.

I wish I could say that the American elites here—people with money, connections or world-class expertise, or in many cases all three—were brimming with optimism. But they aren't, which means that they are not much different from you and me.

© 2008