 First, what's next for the U.S. economy? Several indicators show the recovery is underway, albeit slow. What will it take to build up momentum, or could the economy slip again? Joining us now to go inside the research is Michael Brandel, assistant clinical professor of finance at Ohio State Fisher College of Business. Michael, thanks for joining us. Pleasure. A tall order that you have to answer to there. You know, January is always the state of things, the state of the union, the state of the state, the state of the economy, looking into 2012. What do you think? There's a lot of uncertainty, and that becomes the biggest problem. We've got uncertainty about what's going to happen in Europe. I mean, we talk about that we live in a global economy, and we're feeling the impact of it right now. So there's a lot of things that are really beyond our control and really be able to fully anticipate what's going to happen. So you've got to worry about what's going around the rest of the world, and we have to worry about those consumers. 70% of the U.S. economy, remember, is household spending. And consumers are on edge right now, worried about what's going to happen at their job, what's going to happen about the future. A lot of unknowns. Let's talk about where we've been and where we're heading. I don't think we want to go back to where we've been at some points, you know, here all the time that March of 2009 was kind of that low point, started in 2007, and then the spring of 2009 was kind of our low point. Since then, it's been a slow growth with hiccups along the way. Is it those hiccups that scare people off? It is, and we're seeing what's oftentimes referred to as the jobless recovery. The economy is growing. We're increasing the level of output, but we're really not seeing huge amounts of job creation. Also, what's happening is, yeah, we're getting these bumps that are coming from the rest of the world. So we have to worry about, well, just how exactly is the Eurozone going to deal with these credit problems that they have? And there can be these massive ripple effects. So we're also seeing that even when there are job openings, sometimes people don't have the skills to be able to fit the positions that are opening. So we also have to worry about these skill imbalances that exist. When we say the economy is growing, albeit slow, people out there may say, really, it is. Not in my book, but in your understanding and everything that you've seen in the indicators of 2011 looking into 2012, we are growing a little by little. We are, and remember, we've seen these green shoots before, where things look to be improving. We see some data improving. Just recently we saw the manufacturing sector looking like it's getting some life and that's very important for us here in Ohio. So we hope those things can continue and some of those green shoots can really take route and really result in a growing economy. But at this point it is very, very difficult to say with any amount of certainty that in 12 months from now we're going to be at X. But it is your thought that we need to do certain things to keep it going and one of your beliefs is that we do need to restructure our financial system, correct? Correct. What do you mean by that? One of the things we have to be careful of is when we look at the slowdown in the economy that we just don't worry about the symptoms. The lack of economic growth is a symptom. The cause, remember, is this financial crisis that we have. If you look at it, a lot of our financial system is still based in the world of the 1940s and 1950s. We don't live in 1947 anymore. But in many ways, a lot of the structure of our financial system is still based on a world that happened right after the Second World War. So we have to think about ways to get capital to entrepreneurs, to our middle-sized firms, as opposed to just continuing to subsidize the housing industry and things like that. So we're operating still under short-term fixes. Absolutely. Band-aids. This idea that the future is six months from now. It's not. What got us into this problem was a lot of that short-term thinking, just worrying about the next quarter, worrying about just what's going to happen over the next few weeks. And that is tough for a company that might be struggling out there. They have to think just about the next quarter. So what's your advice for them? And they get a lot of pressure from Wall Street to hit those earnings figures if they're a big, a publicly held company. But it becomes one of those things that what oftentimes strong leaders will do is they will avoid just trying to go along with what everyone else is doing and really think about the long-term impact of the decisions that they're making. What are some points of the long-term policy that maybe business owners out there can think about? Yeah, we've really got to think about how are we going to restructure those financial markets. The Frank Dodd Act was just a drop in the bucket and it's probably really not going to fix our problems. And we have to think about how we live in a global economy. We cannot simply just continue to change our policies without really coordinating those with what goes on around the rest of the world. Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and we're all in this together. We've got to think about how our actions are going to impact everybody else. Yeah, you mentioned that global economy and things that are out of our control and what's so frustrating is that if there's an uprising of some sort from the financial sector in Greece, let's say, and then it affects our markets here in the U.S., how do we break out of that? Are we too reliant on even one country in Europe? Probably not. We need the Europeans to have a strong economy so that they can be an economic engine to help pull the rest of the world along. For so long it's just been us. The rest of the world is dependent upon the U.S. to pull the global economy. We need a strong Europe. We are all intertwined. But what that means is for a business leader is you've got to keep an eye on what's going on around the world because that will impact you here in the state of Ohio. Okay. 2012, looking forward, the biggest challenges facing companies you think maybe this year. Consumer confidence. We really have to look at what's going to happen to consumers. Are they going to be willing to undertake some of those big purchases? And the other thing we really have to worry about is the uncertainty that's coming out of Washington. A lot of uncertainty in terms of, well, what rules and regulations are we going to, our business is going to be facing over the next several years? If Congress can't agree or if Congress is going to try to completely change its focus every couple of years, creates massive amounts of uncertainty for firms, it becomes very, very difficult for business leaders. And here we have a presidential election year. A lot of people say that has a big effect on business. They have the economy. You agree. It absolutely does. And what it's doing is it's creating a huge amount of uncertainty. And market participants hate uncertainty. They'll pull back, won't undertake investments. Okay. Let's go glass half full now. The biggest opportunities for businesses in 2012. Costs are probably never going to get lower. So what firms and managers really have to think about are some of those very long-term projects. Go out and try to, if you can, get the capital now. Lock in those nice low costs because once the economy picks back up or we start to see pressure from inflation, costs of capital are going to just be going up and up and up. So think long-term. I know it's hard. It's easy to say, difficult to do. But now are some of the greatest buying opportunities and opportunities for long-term planning. All right. And we, I promise to end on a positive note. All right. Michael Brandl, thanks a lot. Thanks, Mike.