Thomas Oliver is a business columnist for AJC Sunday. He can be reached at toliver.writeright@gmail.com

Good economic news keeps trickling in. We seem to have avoided the dreaded double-dip recession, though how quickly we’ll recover is still uncertain. Jeffrey M. Humphreys, Terry College of Business professor at UGA, early on predicted the length and severity of the recession, as well as saying it would be a jobless recovery.

Politically manufactured disasters always result in politically motivated reform. And the reformers aim to avoid responsibility while pointing to a scapegoat and praying for a gullible public. The Financial Panic of ‘08 was primarily the result of bad economic policy.

That most dreaded of dates, April 15, has come and gone. It followed by one week another date that isn't as well known, or even real for that matter -- Tax Freedom Day. The folks at the conservative leaning Tax Foundation calculate that April 8 was the date Georgians finished working for the taxmen and women in Washington, Atlanta and the 159 county seats scattered across our expansive state.

My economist email pen pals are encouraged by recent signs and wonders, not the least of which is the continuing uptick in consumer spending. As everyone knows, consumers frolicking in malls are the keys to our good fortunes. “Retail sales and personal consumption expenditures have been surprisingly strong so far this year,” Mark Vitner, of Wells Fargo Securities, writes me.

A new corporate culture and a bifurcated workforce are emerging from this life-changing recession. And it might surprise folks to discover who has the upper hand. A jobless recovery will mean many things, but clearly it implies that companies will not rush to replace the 8.

There are some issues that we as a country seem oddly silent about. Like the unemployment rate of our young people, particularly young blacks. One can’t help but think that if the other party occupied the White House this would be a raging issue. Fingers would be pointed.

Talk to mortgage bankers, brokers, number crunchers and other wise observers of the metro Atlanta housing market, and you will hear some encouraging news. You also will hear of some still unbelievable aftereffects of the general debauchery that was Atlanta's housing market from 2003 to 2007.

This column is not for the faint of heart. Or for those who have been driven to their wits’ end by the weather. Everyone, it seems, has cabin fever. Tired of overcoats and cold feet, ducking wintry winds, watching the Weather Channel and asking whether General Lee or Punxsutawney Phil saw their shadows and .

There is nothing like an economic crisis to stimulate interest in economists and their theories. When the Financial Panic of ‘08 hit full force, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke proposed spending more money than we knew existed. He was relying on Milton Friedman’s ghost to direct him.

The jobs bill appears to be falling apart. However, a scaled-down Senate compromise would give employers a break from paying their portion (6.2 percent) of the Social Security tax for the rest of the year when they hire a worker who has been unemployed for more than 60 days.

Amidst all the proposals for jump-starting the jobs market through small business, more attention needs to be focused on start-ups. That is where new jobs come from. From 1980 through 2005, all net job growth occurred at firms less than five years old.

Bankers by nature aren't the most jocular bunch. Nowadays, however, they can have the haggard look of a refugee. Bankers have taken a beating in their communities, in the media and from the nation's bully pulpit in D.C. A group of 150 plus gathered in Savannah Tuesday to lick their wounds and listen to a pep talk from the new Southeast regional president of Wells Fargo.

Here we go again. With proposals for creating jobs in our small businesses that owners say won’t do the trick. The problem small businesses face (larger businesses, too) is a lack of customers, noted in the drop in sales. That being the case, a tax credit for new hires doesn't address the problem.

Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face. As Atlanta adjusts to the new world order with fewer homes being built and few, if any, speculative high rises -- in short, as we adapt to an economy that isn’t driven by real estate -- we need not despair.

We look for silver linings. We cling to words of encouragement. We despair at one more layoff, one more cutback. So it is with December’s unemployment rate, which remained flat only because more than half a million Americans were too discouraged to look.

Real estate isn’t going to lead us out of the Great Recession, despite the long-held notion that if housing got us into this mess, housing would get us out. Not going to happen. You can discuss politics. You can debate policy. But you might as well argue with a brick wall as to fight the math.

Been down so long, just about anything looks like up. That’s my economic forecast for 2010: It won’t feel very good, but it won’t hurt nearly as much as last year or the year before. Or as Jeff Rosensweig, professor at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University puts it: “The economy will continue to bring more pain than joy.

During this year of rising unemployment and foreclosures, the one bright spot has been the stock market. If the value of our homes continued to take a beating, at least our 401 (k) s have recovered some of their losses. But in the devilish way math works, after the markets lost 50 percent in the Panic of 2008, a 60 percent increase this year still leaves us about 25 percent shy of where the fall began.

Even as the unemployment rate dropped, concern has heightened over the 26 million Americans out of work or underemployed. That’s because the recession may have ended but hiring has yet to begin. So Washington is doing what it does: proposing a solution.

If all you paid attention to were the Dow Jones index and the unemployment rate, you would be justifiably confused. The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street has rarely been greater. I asked a few economists what indicators they look at for clues beyond the headlines.

Thomas J. Stanley doesn’t believe we’ve learned our lesson. The Atlanta author, former Georgia State professor and expert on the wealthy writes in his new book that once the fear recedes, we’ll go right back to spending like the shopoholics we are. That might be good news for our economy, which is so dependent on consuming spending.

You know things are awful when Washington politicians seem genuinely concerned about small business, rather than simply spouting the usual platitudes toward an amorphous group that typically lacks the political muscle of Wall Street or unions. Within the last week, head honchos from the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffett himself have expressed concern that small business isn’t responding as needed.

To understand why Georgia has lost more banks than any other state during this recession, you need to understand why we had so many to begin with. And why so many seemed addicted to real estate. Or, as Doug Williams, chief executive of Atlantic Capital Bank, says: “We are where we are because of who we were.

If you thought the debate about health care was surreal, then don’t throw away those 3-D glasses, because you’ll need them to have any shot at understanding the cap and trade bills now making their way through the corridors of Congress. When David Ratcliffe says the result could be awful, you need to know how understated the chief executive of the Southern Co.

To understand why Georgia has lost more banks than any other state during this recession, you need to understand why we had so many to begin with. And why so many seemed addicted to real estate. Or, as Doug Williams, chief executive of Atlantic Capital Bank, says: “We are where we are because of who we were.

You want to believe that things are getting better. That the partial restoration of your 401 (k) was based on reality and not just another bubble. You aren’t sure you can handle another bubble bursting, but you’ve been suspicious for some time that the market’s rise wasn’t sustainable.

When the newly named executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority looks out on the Savannah River as two tugboats dock a ship from Asia, he imagines a line from Chicago to Dallas. Curtis J. Foltz notes that 80 percent of the U.S. population lives east of that line.

The Senate Finance Committee must be participating in a prison rehabilitation program. It obviously has a former Enron accountant dummying up the Baucus health care bill, which has enough phony accounting procedures to get someone in the private sector sent to jail.

Talk to mortgage bankers, brokers and housing experts and you’ll be hard pressed to find one who suggests letting the first-time homebuyers’ tax credit expire. They are unanimous in saying the $8,000 credit has helped, though they differ on how much. They are equally unanimous in saying that metro Atlanta’s housing market has finally stabilized.

What a week. Home prices rose. Consumer confidence dropped. Personal spending took off. Mortgage rates dipped below 5 percent. And the stock market went all wobbly to start the fourth quarter. The some good, some bad, some contradictory reports are to be expected when the economy is at an inflection point, says Mercer University’s Roger Tutterow.

It’s been a year. Remember when we were watching the impossible take place? Our 401(k)s were getting mauled as the Panic of 2008 set in. We were already hurting by then, as we had been watching our investments decline since the previous autumn. We were in the 11th month of a bear market.

A jpeg of a poster resides on my computer’s desktop. The poster is of a firm handshake. The caption reads, “Consulting: If you aren’t part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” I didn’t find that joke in the just published “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong,” by Matthew Stewart.

As a unique way of noting the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Wall Street, a grand fight has broken out among economists, with fingers wagging in pointed essays, scholarly journals, blogs and national magazine pieces. Everyone blames each other for not predicting and therefore preventing the Great Recession and the Panic of 2008.

Atlanta Federal Reserve President Dennis Lockhart is a worried man. If he weren’t a worrier by nature, his job would have made him one. Two days before he took over the Atlanta Fed on March 1, 2007, he witnessed lightning strikes emanating from storm clouds that had been gathering across the country: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae announced they would no longer buy subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.

I don’t like this anymore than you do. But here goes: Despite our first positive report on housing prices in forever, the slide isn’t over. When the latest Case-Shiller Index revealed that prices of metro Atlanta homes increased from May to June — ending our two-year slide into oblivion — a collective sigh was heard from Buford to Jonesboro.

As consensus builds that the recession is over, some are crediting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s stewardship and all but re-nominating him by acclamation. But others worry that declaring the recession over is a tad premature. “I would be hesitant to declare the recession over while unemployment remains so dire,” said George Selgin, professor of economics at the Terry College of Business at UGA and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

We may have reached the bottom of our economic descent, but certain segments remain more like black holes that threaten what is likely to be at best an anemic recovery. The dirty bomb of commercial real estate hasn’t detonated yet, though many of us expected it by now.

What we believe to be true motivates our actions far more than any official proclamation of reality. It’s the old “perception is reality” maxim. We want to believe this is the bottom. We’re ready to dust ourselves off, ask who’s got the flashlight and hope the climb back up doesn’t set off an avalanche of loose rocks.

Let’s take a quick glimpse backward at a couple of recessions to see what might lie ahead in the way of recovery, as everyone seems to agree we have reached a bottom. Until this one, I’ve always considered the 1973-75 recession the worst.

The last time we were here, when we just had to do something, immediately, we passed a $787 billion spending bill that promised to stimulate the economy. We know better now. It hasn’t come close to living up to its billing and won’t anytime soon.

Mike Sullivan is typical of our small businessmen and women. He built a business, Southeast Sealing Inc., over the last 37 years that now employs 25. He’s brought his son, Michael, into the business. Along the way, he’s been an active member of his community, serving today as chair of the Rockdale Development Authority, while all along contributing to just about any charity that walked into his Conyers office.

Who knew we needed another missile treaty with the Russians?

"You've got to be kidding" is the howl being heard from mortgage brokers responding to the new underwriting rules.

If Hollywood made an action movie of the financial reform plan it would produce a story featuring a mysterious Regulator.

We are approaching the end of the second quarter, when, we've been told, we'll slide into the summer months where the grass is green, flowers bloom and breezes blow gently.

Incoming college freshmen beware: Credit card companies have until February to sign you up.

The new credit card law can't protect us from ourselves. Congress has created law where the Federal Reserve had created policy. The Fed's rules are to take effect July 2010. The politicians are rushing their version into place four months earlier. The real difference? Politicians get to claim they socked it to the big bad credit card companies.

It's the jobs, stupid. No matter where you go, what you hear about is jobs. Jobs lost to the recession. Jobs needed for recovery. How jobs are related to the housing crisis and the pending commercial real estate implosion. And, of course, the obvious connection between jobs and consumer spending.

You know times are tough when you are a successful 72-year-old businessman sleeping on a blowup mattress in an empty house.