Reasons to be economically cheerful.

To read the message of gloom in the press going into Election Day, you'd think that it's a near certainty that within a couple of years we'll all be living in (heavily mortgaged) tents, heating up cans of beans with our last remaining stocks of propane. You'll find publications—like, say, this one—serving up a time capsule of news from the 1930s Great Depression. You'll find writers—yes, like this one—telling you that however bad you think the mortgage and financial crises are, they'll get worse.

But the imploding real estate and financial services markets aren't the only drivers of the economy. John McCain was rightly pilloried when he said that "the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong." It was the wrong message for the wrong day. The United States has genuine fundamental economic problems. But it has real strengths, too. In fact, as much as McCain was criticized for serving up the "fundamentals are strong" line, it's probable that when Obama takes office in January, he'll spend his first day sending out a very similar "we're not that far down" signal. And, in fact, we're not Iceland. The United States isn't close to getting kicked back to the '70s. So, a few things that can give us reason for optimism:

1. Tech Is Stronger Than Ever. The United States is still home to some of the world's most successful companies, and a few of them have spent the last few years on a hell of a tear. You've heard of some of them: Apple, Google, Intel. The global frenzy over the iPhone showed that there's an enormous world demand for Apple's products, and Apple has barely started to fill it. Google, somehow miraculously quarter after quarter, continues to meet sky-high expectations. Intel has done a spectacular job of maintaining its near monopoly of PC microprocessors while carefully hedging its bets and separating its fortunes from Microsoft.

IBM now has the world's fastest supercomputer, and the second- and third-fastest, as well. That's just a tiny fraction of IBM's business, which depends mainly on software and services-and is growing fastest outside the United States. Microsoft isn't going away, either, and while Apple's ads might seem like they're ubiquitous here, it's Microsoft that's ubiquitous worldwide (a point highlighted in its newest ad campaign). Oracle is thumping its international competition.

There's more. The froth of the tech boom has evaporated, but the strong coffee is still there. Many overhyped tech companies have crashed and burned, but a few—Juniper Networks, for instance—have prospered and grown and become major players. And there's a whole new crop of companies growing in Silicon Valley, from deep-in-the-weeds tech experts like Arista Networks to fumbling, but still fascinating and promising, electric carmaker Tesla.

2. The Dollar Is Still the World's Favorite Currency. Yes, we're right smack in the middle of the worst financial panic in half a century. But guess what? The rest of the world is, too. European stock markets have fallen as far as ours, and what the investment pros call "emerging markets"—that is, everyone else—have gone down even further. (Russia's down two-thirds.) In a panic, people flee to safety, even if, as it happens in this case, that it's right into the arms of the folks—us—who've pretty much slapped them senseless. U.S. government bonds remain the world's safest investments, and other countries are holding on to their dollar reserves and putting them in Treasuries.