Last week, we saw President Obama expressing some guarded optimism with the US economy and declaring that there were "glimmers of hope".

that coincides with economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal saying they expect the recession to end in September although unemployment will continue to be a problem well into 2010.

"The end of the decline isn't the beginning of the recovery," David Resler of Nomura Securities told the WSJ.

Actually, it's going to be hard to tell whether the decline is ending at all. As former secretary of Labor Robert Reich says on his blog, we're not at the beginning of the end, and probably not even at the end of the beginning.

"Of course mortage rates are declining, mortgage orginations are surging, and people and companies are borrowing more," Reich says. "So much money is sloshing around the economy that its price is bound to drop. And cheap money is bound to induce some borrowing. The real question is whether this means an economic turnaround. The answer is it doesn't. Cheap money, you may remember, got us into this mess ... The only economic fundamental that's changed since then is that so many people got so badly burned that the trust necessary for consumers, investors, and businesses to repeat what they did then has vanished. Yes, banks will lend to highly trustworthy borrowers, and the low-hanging fruit of highly trustworthy borrowers is the first they'll pick. But there's not much of this kind of fruit to go around. And yes, some consumers will refinance and use the extra money they extract from their homes to spend again. But most will use the extra money to pay off debt and start saving again, as they did years ago. Most consumers continue to worry about their jobs, and for good reason."

Reich warns that the events of the last few years have shown us that unbridled optimism could wreak enormous damage on an economy. Clearly, it's a lesson some haven't learned yet. Another term for unbridled optimism is "clutching at straws".

Certainly, until the jobs market picks up, most people won't be sharing that optimism.