Fred Dickson has learned to watch for telling, if unofficial, economic indicators during his 38 years in the securities industry.

Eighteen months ago, Dickson, who's a market strategist and director of retail research for D.A. Davidson & Co., noticed that a string of idle railroad cars that Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway parks on a track near Helena, Mont., had grown so long it stretched for 26 miles. Sitting rolling stock doesn't carry goods or grain, but by a month ago, Dickson says, the string of cars was down to five miles long. That might not be as weighty as the latest Gross Domestic Product or Consumer Confidence Index numbers, but it's an anecdotal indicator that Dickson finds noteworthy.

Dickson, based in Lake Oswego, Ore., sometimes spends the night in Spokane, and he says waiters at the Red Lion River Inn bar said last spring their tips "were horrible," but had "stabilized" by summer, and now are "a little better." Again, a small sign of improvement.

Dickson, who drives around the Northwest a lot in his job, also counts moving vans on the highway. "There aren't many right now," he says. Recently, he asked small-business owners and managers in Sandpoint if it had become any easier for them to get short-term credit for their operations. They said no—and that credit-card companies, in anticipation of coming new regulations, had reduced or pulled the businesses' lending lines even if they had never missed a payment.

Dickson says regulators are telling banks to hang onto the capital they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program so they can withstand problem commercial real estate loans, which are hitting home with a vengeance now. At least, however, we no longer have to worry about a financial system collapse, which deepened the Great Depression, Dickson says. He says that while the skyrocketing federal debt is worrisome, at least the government appears to have staved off a depression, which "massive" crowds at D.A. Davidson investor meetings a year ago feared.

Dickson believes the stock market hit bottom in the first quarter, when "we went from no fear to complete fear," and the economy bottomed in September. He says businesspeople remain guarded and are "petrified of tax increases" because of the hefty spending in Washington, D.C. He adds that while small businesses usually lead the way out of recession, they're reluctant to hire more workers until they know what will happen with health-care reform and, oddly, cap-and-trade.

He sees some good signs, noting that U.S. nonpublic long-term capital investment rose in the third quarter to an annualized rate of 11 percent.

"We're seeing the first signs of a shallow recovery, verified by state employment data, but only a very slow recovery is sustainable," Dickson says. Local economies like Spokane's, which rely heavily on the services sector, will lag until local and state government revenues stabilize, he adds.

In the future, Dickson believes, acquisition, distribution, purification, and desalinization of domestic water will be the "No. 1 global need" in terms of infrastructure spending, followed by alternative energy technology, business and personal security systems, preventive and diagnostic health-care systems, food acquisition, food distribution equipment, and "hard infrastructure" spending to rebuild cities. D.A. Davidson, he says, has added 55 financial consultants in the past year. "If you're going to pick up services-oriented business, you have to do it when times are tough," he says.

The gray-haired Dickson adds, "We've been clipped twice in 10 years," in 2001 by the dot-com bust, 9/11, and the accounting scandal, and in 2007-2008 by the bursting of the housing bubble and the meltdown of the financial system.

"There's hell to pay," he says. "Wall Street never goes in moderation."