Yea! The recession is over. What? There are no jobs available? But the recession is over! Oh, we have to innovate first? But no one is hiring people that will then innovate? It ended in the summer of 2009?! WTF, clearly a bunch of us didn’t get THAT memo in time for Christmas!

I am so confused. Can I buy the new Apple iPad or should I be buying rice and beans to store in my cellar?

This is from Mr. Greenspan on Meet the Press this week. (read the whole transcript here).

MR. GREENSPAN: The recession is over. It bottomed back in the middle of last year. And while it doesn’t have the strong momentum I had hoped it would have, strangely, because of the fact that we had such a strong fourth quarter, which was essentially using up a lot of the latent power of events, which was the gradual reduction in the rate of decline in inventories. We did it all in the fourth quarter, and we since–we shot our ammunition. So it’s going to be a slow, trudging thing, but I do think we’re going to be moving forward. And, as Hank says, the issue here is basically innovation. Innovation by definition is not forecastable, so we don’t know where the jobs are coming from. We don’t know how this market is exactly in terms of dynamics going to move forward. But we know that this process is under way, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so.

Click your heals and just believe Dorothy. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.