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America’s recovery is neither robust nor dramatic. But it is real

SINCE Florida's property market collapsed and its economy tanked, Hillsborough County has endured almost nonstop austerity. In the past five years the government of the county, halfway up the state's Gulf coast, has eliminated a quarter of its 6,000 positions through attrition and lay-offs. It has scaled back after-school child care. Workers' pay has been frozen for three years.

But the fiscal year that begins in October holds the prospect of relief. Property-tax revenue is declining more slowly. Tourism-related taxes have stabilised. Sales-tax revenue is actually up. There is still a deficit to be eliminated, but it is a third of the size it was a year ago; the county thinks it will need no lay-offs next year. Things aren't getting better, says Tom Fesler, the county's budget director. “It's more a function of just not getting worse.”

Such faint praise is not as damning as it seems; there has been an awful lot of worse in the past few years. America's recovery may have officially begun in mid-2009, but it has bogged down repeatedly since. That has in part been due to circumstances beyond American control, such as rising oil prices and Europe's debt crisis. But it has also been due to the hangover of the recession: consumers have been shedding debt, lenders have been reluctant, housing markets have been moribund, and state and local governments like Mr Fesler's have been cutting budgets in the face of prohibitions on deficits.

Some of those impediments have now gone away. Economic and financial indicators released in the past few weeks portray a surprisingly chipper economy. In the three months to the end of February employers added 734,000 jobs, which is the best result since April 2006 if you exclude from past figures workers hired temporarily for the federal census. The unemployment rate has fallen by 0.7 percentage points since September, to 8.3%. And this is not just a matter of discouraged workers giving up the hunt for work. A broader measure of unemployment that includes discouraged and underused workers has fallen even further.

The Federal Reserve has been toying for months with plans for a new round of “quantitative easing”—the purchase of bonds with newly created money—as a way of stimulating demand. But at its meeting on March 13th it decided it didn't need the plans yet, and upgraded its outlook for the economy, which in January had been merely “modest”, to “moderate”. That same day the stockmarket jumped to its highest since May 2008. It was helped both by good news on retail sales and by another announcement from the Fed: most major banks passed the stress tests that it had administered.