Here at www.bearmarketcentral.com, we've come up with our own new-fangled economic indicator, the BUsiness Magazine Price Index, the "BUMP." This is our unscientific, unofficial survey of the state of the financial publishing industry, as a proxy for the economy as a whole.

Probably like you, each month we receive numerous unsolicited junk mail solicitations (both the snail mail and spam mail varieties) from the financial big guns, practically begging us to subscribe to their "indispensable" publications at fire sale prices.

We'll start looking for the bottom in the U.S. markets when the BUMP hits 95, or when half of these magazines cease publication, whichever comes first.

Here's the previous data: