The Economy Rebounding -- or Boomeranging?

The economy is almost certainly on the mend. I'll admit that I am conspicuously short on credentials to render such a judgment. Math has never been my thing, and I have always been better at spending money than assessing its relative value. I have no show on CNBC and so far no one has called to get my take on things, but I am sure that things have turned a corner. My assessment is certainly not scientific; it draws on no detailed assessment of market rates or statistics; I have undertaken no independent surveys, and owning no stock that I am aware of I have not been tracking incremental fluctuations of my net worth. My conclusion is drawn from a single economic indicator: the newspaper.

For the first time in months, I could pick up my paper off the front porch this morning without the aid of a spatula. Today's edition actually had enough pages in it for the rolled mass to actually be 3-dimensional. The plastic sleeve had taken on almost sausage-like tautness. The real evidence, however, was the reason behind all that newsprint: ads. Pages and pages of them. Double page ones, full page ones, half page ones and zillions of smaller ones. Car dealers, plant nurseries, grocery stores and merchants; cell phone carriers, furniture stores, eyeglass outlets and department stores. Ads all over the place.

I detected little or no change in the volume of editorial content around all those ads, but then the owners of the paper have long-since laid off all the reporters, and there is only so much you can skim off the AP Wire and the other syndicators. Who knows, if this keeps up they might even split the Metro "section" and the Business "section" back into two actual sections. Maybe they will even rehire the editorial cartoonist. And what about the Saturday Faith and Values section? OK, now I've drifted into fantasy.

Nonetheless, I am happy to see the improvement -- that people must be feeling less of a pinch, that businesses must be experiencing some discretionary profits, that the newspaper must be generating greater revenues -- and to take heart from all that it portends: having perused all these new and expanded advertisements for the wide and myriad inventories of essential trinkets and baubles, readers will rush out to those businesses and offer up more cash, and once more spend more than they have, and charge more, and...

...wait. Isn't this the way all the problems got started in the first place?

Oh well, the boom was fun for the few minutes it lasted.