THAT'S ALL YOU GOT?:

The Recession is Over (Daniel Gross, 7/26/09, NEWSWEEK)

The Great Recession, which rolled over our financial lives like one of P.J. Keating's giant pavers, is most likely over. Home sales, while still far below the levels of a year ago, have risen for three straight months—a first since 2004. The stock market has rallied 44 percent since March, thanks to renewed optimism and improving earnings from big companies like Goldman Sachs and Apple. In June, seven of the 10 indicators in the Conference Board Leading Economic Index pointed upward, including manufacturing hours worked and unemployment claims. Macroeconomic Advisers, the St. Louis–based consulting firm, says the economy is expanding at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the current quarter. Economic activity "will increase slightly over the remainder of 2009," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress.

Irrational exuberance, it's not. But even stagnation would be an improvement over recent history. The U.S. economy shrank at nearly a 6 percent annualized rate between September 2008 and March 2009, a shocking slowdown that pitched the global economy into recession for the first time since World War II. "This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression," Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said in January.

Poor guy. Mr. Gross has had the "misfortune" to be an economic writer in a country that's experienced a boom for his entire adult life. No wonder he leaps to refer to what barely qualifies as a recession technically the "Great Recession." At least he's writing retrospectively, not prospectively, so he avoids looking quite as silly as the Nobel laureate.

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A Nation Hard to Short (ROGER COHEN, 7/27/09, NY Times)

The other morning, I caught Warren Buffett on MSNBC. The Sage of Omaha was in sprightly form, perhaps buoyed by the market’s summer surge. He was asked where the market was headed in the next few months and he said he had no idea but he knew one thing: “It’s hard to short America in the long term.”

All the debt, personal and national, notwithstanding, I have to second that. As it happened, I’d been up very early that morning to talk to CNN’s excellent John Roberts about Iran. Waiting for the show, I looked east across Central Park to the rising sun just knotting its tie over the serried high rises of midtown and the Upper East Side.

It was a magnificent sight, the city resplendent. New York has recovered, if not its stride, at least its balance.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2009 10:33 AM