After spending the weekend digging out from the latest “storm of the century,” it feels good to get back to my desk and away from my shovel and snowblower. Hope everyone here in the Northeast made it through with as little pain as possible.

According to my wife, who presumably got it from a reliable source, it was the fifth worst winter storm on record. But then, we’ve had multiple record-setting “hundred-year storms” over the past couple of years, which suggests either that something has changed or that our standards for hundred-year storms are out of whack. Maybe we’ve all been the unknowing beneficiaries of a spell of peaceful weather that’s now ending.

Off to a great start

The market hiccup yesterday was widely attributed to Europe, which raises the question—what’s happening in Europe? I haven’t written about Europe for a couple of months. The last time, just after Thanksgiving, I noted that the situation was normalizing but we could certainly expect storms ahead. Two months later, the storm warnings are starting to sound.

Economic improvement has continued since then, with a start at recovery in the northern tier of the European Union. The southern tier, however, has continued to weaken—not so much economically as politically. Greece, for a change, isn’t the driving factor this time. Instead, two of the largest countries in the EU, Spain and Italy, are now showing cracks.

I am actually not going to spend a lot of time talking about the numbers today, as I have made most of my points multiple times. I am also on my way back from the West Coast and am writing this in Sky Harbor airport, which will constrain my time.

I wrote yesterday that “bad is good,” in that the poor results for fourth-quarter GDP actually concealed quite a bit of underlying good news. I still feel that way, but after taking a closer look at the numbers, I think it’s worth considering what the report means for the economy in the next couple of years.

There are two major things going on here: the recovery of the real economy, and the slow removal of federal fiscal and monetary stimulus.

So, gross domestic product—that is, the U.S. economy—declined a bit (by 0.1 percent, to be exact) for the fourth quarter of last year. Is this it? Is a recession starting? What about all the good news I’ve been discussing? Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!

Okay, I feel better now. In fact, while no one wants to see a decline in GDP, if we have to have one, this is exactly how we want it to happen.

The S&P 500 Index recently closed above 1,500 and is making a bid to go up from there. Fund flows are starting to move away from bonds and back toward equities—for the past month, anyway. There is speculation that the “Great Rotation” away from bonds and back to equities is underway. Is it so? And if it is, what will that mean?

Quite possibly it is true, and if so it could mean a lot. Sentiment seems to have shifted substantially with respect to the stock market, with investor surveys at historically very high levels. When narratives shift, the effects can be big and lasting. But sentiment can only go so far, and so it pays to look at the underlying fundamentals as well.

As I’ve been talking about the housing recovery for some time, I thought it would be worth giving it a more detailed look. I don’t intend to get very quantitative here, but there are a number of charts that illustrate just how far we’ve come. First, let’s take a look at housing affordability.

The economic slowdown on the financial crisis, combined with rapidly declining asset values, put the economy at risk of deflation. For reasons I discussed in the last post, the Federal Reserve (Fed) is actually trying to create inflation as a preferable alternative to deflation.

Over the past couple of weeks, significant progress in financial regulation has been made at both the U.S. and international levels, and most people don’t care. (Nor should they, in many ways.) Yet, there have been a couple of developments that are relevant to the average person.

First, though, let’s look at a broad picture of why banks matter. If the country had to operate with each individual or business using its own assets, growth would be very limited. Banks (or other lending institutions, but let’s keep it simple) allow those with extra capital to provide it, for a fee, to those who need the capital and are willing and able to pay for it. The bank acts as an intermediary and takes its own fees. Everyone benefits: the depositor, who gets paid; the borrower, who gets access to capital; and the bank, which also gets paid.