My Wall Street Journal Tells Me: Things are looking up!

Accordingly, they give a list of indicators of why things are looking up. 1) The stock market is up, 2)Citi & BoA purportedly made profits in Jan. & Feb. (notwithstanding the hundreds of billions of losses last year -- of course, the WSJ had no evidence of this...), 3) Several indicators of manufacturing & consumer sentiment were either flat or up very marginally in feb/late feb/early march vs. january...

Since i'm a bit suspicious of 2), and 3) seems like a wash (things were really bad in january, i don't think it's any shock that things didn't get any worse...), this basically reduces to: things are looking up b/c the stock market is up and all else at least doesn't look like it's getting demonstrably worse.

That being said, I just can't believe that the US is about to fall into anything like the Great Depression. 12% unemployment, perhaps, but not total Armageddon. Dow 6500 does seem a bit cheap...