Otherwise, this is the first time in more than a year (or two, depending on your perspective) since the GDP report showed unambiguous growth across the board. If there's a single report that confirms that the economy has dodged a bullet—i.e., avoided a deeper, prolonged contraction—today's update is it. Thanks largely to Bernanke's Fed, the central bank's great mistake in the 1930s—keeping monetary policy too tight after the economic slump—has been avoided this time. GDP's Q3 report tells us so in no uncertain terms.

Indeed, it's no small trick to elevate consumer spending in the wake of the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression. And yet the numbers in our table below show that Joe Sixpack has been pulling out his wallet and spending across the board. This is no free lunch, of course, and so there'll be a price to pay for juicing consumer spending at a time of mounting debts and default. But the bigger risk, albeit temporary risk, was allowing spending generally to seize up. We've avoided that trap, at least for the moment, although we fear that we've traded an large acute problem for a modest chronic one that lingers.

In short, there are caveats lurking behind today's sunny GDP report. Many caveats. For now, we'll simply note one. The jump in durable goods, for instance, was assisted in no small way by the government's cash-for-clunkers stimulus program that boosted (or seemed to boost) auto purchases in recent months. That was a one-shot deal, of course, and it's not clear that the additional spending generated by the plan didn't simply transfer future spending activity into the present.