Food stamp use is at an all-time high. The Fed is undertaking unprecedented moves in shaking up a stubbornly slow economy. The median family income is declining. Europe is in perpetual crisis. College is prohibitively expensive for many prospective students.
But even when faced with all of this weighty material, sometimes the country fixated on decidedly less important economic issues this year. You know...like bacon shortages.
And so, fully recognizing the irony in doing so, U.S. News brings up this year's business and economics stories that maybe didn't need all the attention they received.
Gas Prices
It's not unreasonable to care about gas prices. In a widely spread-out country, a large portion of which is little served by public transit, there's a natural interest in the cost of getting around. And figures about national gasoline price averages are useful in the sense that they provide a snapshot of supply and demand.
It's in the political realm where the talk of gas prices gets blown out of proportion, with candidates explaining exactly how Washington can raise and lower gas prices.
Yet many of the most distinguished economic minds in the country say that's not true. When asked this year whether the rise in gas prices has been predominately due to market forces (as opposed to government action), economists surveyed by the University of Chicago's Booth School of Economics overwhelmingly agreed.
Perhaps all politics are local, but the market for oil remains global, as it is for any commodity, making it very hard for any one person, even the president, to sway prices meaningfully.
Facebook IPO
As with gas prices, it makes sense that the nation paid attention to it: everyone is on Facebook (even people who don't exist), so an initial stock offering of such a ubiquitous product seemed like the investing event of the year.
And perhaps it deserved that label, but then the company pushed its price targets up and up to $38 per share, with an ultimate valuation of $104 billion, the largest IPO to date, creating yet more frenzy.
After that came the much-publicized fall, to a low of $17.55 in September, leading to yet more hysteria, as people wondered along the way if it was the end of Facebook.
[WORST YEAR EVER: Top 10 Losers of 2012]
It was not, and the price has recovered a bit, to around $27 per share, but a simple lesson was learned: the historically huge IPO should have been less...well...huge.
"The Facebook IPO to me was just an example of a tech company pricing their stock too high when they went public," says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. "It doesn't necessarily mean that the company is doomed for failure or the company doesn't have a good business model. It just means the people who are in charge for finance priced the stock too high."
The Great 2013 Bacon Shortage
Somewhere during the blazing hot summer, those of us who depend on the nation's heartland more for high fructose corn syrup than, say, our livelihoods, decided that the historic drought meant it was time to flap our hands over a potential lack of bacon for putting into sandwiches and dipping in chocolate and keeping local hipsters well-fed.
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