The Bush boom, according to Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, as quoted by Gretchen Mortenson in The New York Times:

But the unpleasant reality remains that private-sector payrolls are now 7.5 million workers below the level that would be typical 25 months into an economic recovery, [Roach] said....

"In the last five months, 280,000 jobs have been created, a number that we get easily in a month during a normal recovery,'' he said. Most of the new jobs are in temporary staffing, health and government, he added.

"The days of an old-fashioned hiring-led recovery are over," Mr. Roach said. "And we have to face that, in terms of understanding the potential for our economy to keep growing as many in our financial markets are now blindly assuming will be the case."

Mr. Roach said the second half of 2004 might bring an economic relapse. Hmm.

And Roach isn't the only economic skeptic:

Also casting doubt on the recovery is Robert H. Parks, economist and professor of finance at Pace University. He said he thought that interest rates would rise significantly by the end of the year, pushed up not by Alan Greenspan, who never saw an asset bubble he didn't like, but by the bond market vigilantes. "Deficits financed by way of freshly printed money to fund tax cuts, pork-barrel spending and huge outlays for military spending are going to generate headline news on sharply rising interest rates, long before 2004 is over," Mr. Parks said.

We'll see.