The Great Disappointment?

From the Times (no, the other one) via Instapundit:

I don’t know about you but I feel a bit cheated. There we all were, led to
believe by so many commentators that the sub-prime crisis was going to force the
United States into a new era of dust bowls and breadlines, a slump that would
call into question the very functioning of the capitalist system in the world’s
largest economy. Carried away on the surging wave of their own economically
dubious verbosity, the pundits even speculated that this unavoidable calamity
might presage some 1930s-style global political cataclysm to match.
Well,
it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up
to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild
Inconvenience. Last week the Commerce Department reported that the US economy –
battered by the credit crunch, pummelled by a housing market collapse and
generally devastated by the wild stampede of animal spirits – actually grew in
the first three months of the year.

We've been hearing since 2001 that the U.S. has had the worst economy under the Bush Administration since the Great Depression of the 1930's. It's possible that after crying wolf for so long, there may be a wolf loitering about. Or folks are still just crying wolf. It is an election year after all.