This is one of the fastest media turnarounds I've seen in a recession.<p>IIRC, the 2001 recession didn't end in the media until later 2004 and early 2005, with the sales of Flickr and Del.icio.us and the development of FaceBook and YouTube. I remember that I didn't even look for sumer internships in 2003 because I figured the market was so bad nobody would hire a mere intern, and about half the companies I approached in 2004 said "We liked your resume, but we're not hiring now." In 07 (after this had all ended), I talked with a fellow computer programmer at a fencing class, and found out he was making <i>half</i> what I was because he had graduated into the sluggish job market of 04 instead of the growth market of 05.<p>In the 91 recession, I recall the media being very subdued and depressed right up until Netscape's IPO in 95.<p>I don't remember the 79-82 recession, but to hear my parents tell it, there was a widespread belief that America had permanently lost its technological edge, and things would <i>never</i> get better. This perception didn't change until around 1984, and even through my childhood in the 80s, I remember recurrent fears that we'd lost our economic supremacy to the Japanese.<p>The only recession I can think of where people started proclaiming "We've turned the corner; happy days are here again" a mere year after it started was the Great Depression. If you read <a href="http://newsfrom1930.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://newsfrom1930.blogspot.com/</a>, it sounds almost exactly like something you could read in the newspapers today.<p>That alone makes me suspicious of this recovery. The point of a recession is so you <i>stop doing what you're doing</i> and find new uses for your labor and capital; that hasn't happened so far. In all the recessions above, that's what brought the country out of it: new markets opened up and absorbed all the workers that were laid off by the old ones. I haven't seen that yet (though there are some interesting developments in mobile and in the revival of hardware hacking); mostly we've seen government attempts to paper over the inefficiencies in old industries with taxpayer dollars.
We're not done by a long shot. The next wave of mortgage resets -- option ARMs -- comes through late this year and next.<p><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/apr2009/bw20090416_103126.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/apr2009/bw2009...</a>
And perhaps "Cash For Clunkers" will get credit?<p>But seriously, it seems like "success" in economic terms these day means "postponing the day of reckoning till your successor is in office" and failure means the opposite. By that token Greenspan succeeded but Bush II failed.
This is article is interesting, and could in the end be correct in its rosy assessment and its allocation of the credit.<p>However, I find it interesting that this article does not say a word about inflation, the creation of currency, or the increasing national debt and the intermediate to long term affects those will have.
It ain't over till the fat lady sings.<p>The economy is basically a chaotic system that is impossible to predict. It's kind of like the weather: More than a few days out you just don't know since there are so many variables and feedback loops.