OC's sluggish growth

The sour housing market has knocked the stuffing out of the normally reliable OC economy. Register columnist Jon Lansner's latest Big Orange Index rose at an annual rate of just 0.8 percent, which is the weakest annual growth in five years. Not a huge surprise, given that the property portion of the index has fallen each quarter for a year now (that's the steepest annual rate of decline since 96). The banker index is also shaky, thanks to all those missed mortgage payments and an increase in local bankruptcies. "The economy is clearly cooling," Lansner writes. "That's not always bad. But anxiety builds up because nobody knows if the next business climate will be simply benign, or a painful decline." It's worth noting that county unemployment last month was a teeny-tiny 3.5 percent - certainly not a sign of a troubled economy.