Despite efforts to improve our methods of analyzing the economy, we were unable to foresee the devastating crash of 2008. Traditional measures such as GDP fail to represent all aspects of the American economy. As a result, economists have researched the relationships between the economy’s stability and other variables, such as stock prices, banking development, and environmental conditions. I have taken this a step further, researching the viability of even more obscure variables, such as the price of fast food and the number men's t-shirt sales, as economic indicators.