The good old Bureau of the Census has jumped into the internet with both feet, too. The Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis has a site with the GDP data. This site used to be hard to use, but just recently they added a nifty way to look at the whole history of the GDP and all its parts since 1929. The Congressional Budget Office now puts the texts of all its publications on the web. These are the guys and gals who keep changing those budget surplus estimates every few months.
Some people seem to think that the stock market is all there is to economics.
Those people are wrong. Still, stock market indexes have their uses, and Yahoo makes indexes from around the world easily available. And, you can find the text of the 2000 Economic Report of the President , complete with data tables. All those economic data sources are great for finding out what's happening now and what happened in the past. No one knows.