Rick Newman

Don't exhale just yet.

The recession is winding down, and shell-shocked consumers can finally begin to repair finances thrashed by the housing bust, stock-market collapse, and wretched job market. But the white-knuckle ride may continue, even as the economy recovers. The whole nation has been living on borrowed money and putting off tough decisions, and the bills are finally getting too big to ignore. Here are six eventualities that will keep the pressure on American families—while providing even more reason to save extravagantly and live carefully:

Taxes will go up. Politicians don't want to talk about it, but there's almost no way around the fact that middle-class Americans will have to pay more out of their pocket to keep government functioning. In many states this is already happening. At least 40 states face gaping budget shortfalls this year, with several of them planning to plug the holes by raising income or sales taxes or enacting new taxes on things like services. At the federal level, some taxes are already going up on high earners, but that won't be nearly enough to cover the gap between what Washington spends and what it takes in every year. "It's inevitable that they'll have to find a way to have a truly middle-income tax increase," says Clint Stretch of Deloitte Tax. That creates a conundrum for President Obama, who has backed himself into a corner by pledging no new taxes on the middle class. That promise seems impossible to keep with the government's debt approaching $14 trillion—a sum equal to the nation's entire economic output—and Greece providing an alarming example of what happens when fiscal discipline erodes.

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The stock market is supposed to lead the economy out of recession, according to the old adage. But what if the economy doesn't want to follow?

Gloom has settled over Wall Street, as the huge rally that ran from March 2009 to April 2010 has turned the other way. From bottom to top, stocks rose by about 83 percent, giving hope to battered investors and repairing some of the damage from the brutal recession we all know about. But now the markets are in decline again, crossing the 10 percent threshold that signals a correction. Manic traders now worry about global contagion spreading out from Greece, the demise of the eurozone and the dreaded double-dip recession.

[See what's going right and wrong with the economy.]

Okay, maybe. But it's also possible that the markets simply got too far ahead of the actual recovery and are now adjusting to more realistic expectations.

First, it's worth pointing out that stock market indexes like the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 may not be as oracular as they once were. Markets these days are dominated by hedge funds and high-volume traders that account for the majority of all trades. These are not long-term investors who buy because they're encouraged about the future prospects of certain companies or the overall economy. These in-and-outers trade on short-term advantages that are often minuscule, but significant if multiplied by millions of shares or leveraged to magnify their value (and risk). Computers make many of the decisions, looking for price differentials in the decimal points. What matters to these traders is the price of something now, compared with the price a few seconds ago or the price a few seconds in the future. The stock indexes don't really tell us what investors think of the overall economy anymore. They tell us what frantic traders think is going up or down in the chaotic present.

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It takes gumption to start a business. But there a lot of other factors, including the availability of jobs, ethnicity, and geography.

Immigrants, for instance, are much more likely to be business owners than people born in the United States. Western states, with a legacy of adventure, have more startups than Midwestern and Southern states. And a weak economy tends to spur entrepreneurship, as people who can't find corporate jobs strike out on their own. That appears to have happened in 2009, when the rate of new-business startups hit the highest level in 14 years, according to a new study by the nonprofit Kauffman Foundation—while the unemployment rate peaked at 10.1 percent.

[See Why Start-ups Surged During the Recession.]

A breakdown of entrepreneurship rates by state shows some familiar and some surprising trends. Oklahoma and Montana top the list, and both states are bucking the trend, with unemployment rates well below the national average. So new businesses in those states are probably being started by people who are genuinely optimistic and plan to keep at it, even as the economy improves. Other states with high startup rates, like Arizona, California, and Florida, have been hammered by the recession, so there may be a lot of reluctant business owners who can't find other jobs. And a few states with low startup rates, like West Virginia, Missouri, and Wisconsin, have nonetheless seen a big jump in new businesses since the recession began, possibly signaling a cultural shift. Robert Fairlie, a University of Southern California economist who authored the Kauffman study, warns against drawing conclusions from big changes in startup rates, since sample sizes in a given year can be small. Yet entrepreneurship clearly seems to be on the rise in many places. Here's how all the states rank:

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Nearly everything had to go. A few months after losing her administrative job in the summer of 2008, 23-year-old Brianna Karp got rid of her furniture, a beloved piano, and most of her books so she could move back in with her parents. When that didn’t work out, she moved into an old trailer a relative had left her, settling into an informal homeless community in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Brea, Calif. By the summer of 2009, she was living without electricity, regular showers, home-cooked food, and most basic conveniences.

[See 21 things we're learning to live without.]

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