The markets seem to be rallying as the Russians dial down the Ukraine confrontation. After a couple of dips, it looks like we’re edging back into a risk-on mode, with Putin apparently deciding that he has what he needs and it’s time to back off.

This will be a short post, as I arrived home at 7:30 this morning after flying and laying over for the past 18 hours or so, so I am a little tired. That said, it was all worthwhile when Jackson came running out of the house to hug me as I pulled up in a cab, then tried to drag my bag—which weighed more than he does—into the house. We did it together—teamwork!

More evidence for the “snowdown” thesis is in. The unexpectedly strong April employment report, with a gain of 288,000 jobs, surprised pretty much everyone, and shows that hiring has come back in a big way after the weak first quarter. Even more encouraging are the upward revisions to first-quarter job growth, with 36,000 more jobs created than were initially reported.

Thinking about my recent post on how normal everything has become, I realize that I should be more grateful for just that. Sitting here on my balcony in Kauai at the Commonwealth President’s Club conference, I certainly have other things to be grateful for as well.

Economic growth came in well below expectations this morning, at 0.1 percent instead of the 1.2 percent generally expected. Ouch. Is this something we should be worrying about?

I’m at the airport on my way to the Commonwealth President’s Club conference, so this will be a brief post. As I’ve written many times before, I love these conferences for a bunch of reasons—the venues, the events, and, most of all, the people.

You can spend all day, every day, looking at and analyzing the plethora of economic and market data. I know, because that’s pretty much what I do. What you find after a while, though, is that much of this information is either redundant or meaningless (or apt to be revised so much that it might as well be).

Consumer confidence will play an increasingly important role in supporting stock prices as earnings show signs of rolling over.

Today’s post is inspired by Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai that depicts the same scene from various perspectives, yielding very different images. Data can be viewed the same way, with various angles giving different impressions and potentially leading to very distinct conclusions.

The headline for this morning is that new home sales are down more than 14 percent on a month-to-month basis. This comes in tandem with drops in mortgage applications and a much smaller drop, of less than 1 percent, in existing home sales. With rates up, and demand potentially declining as institutional buyers pull back, is it time to worry that the housing recovery is over?