Ryan Avent notices several upbeat economic articles, including Daniel Gross's Newsweek cover story. After writing that confidence "is a key ingredient to recovery, and if Americans are convinced that it's once again ok to spend and invest, then the confidence boost to the economy may take on a life of its own," he warns:
[O]ptimism could be dangerous if it leads the country to underestimate its continued vulnerabilitiesto new financial shocks, to new shocks to household budgets (as from rising resource costs), to new deterioration in housing markets, to continued drag from an unemployment problem that remains very serious. At this point in any recovery, complacency is the enemy. All observers want this to be 1983, but it very well might turn out to be 1937.
Reihan goes through the Gross column point by point.