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.