To echo Anne's point yesterday, I see there's more standard-issue, carnival-barking happy talk out of the Wall Street noise machine today. As in, wow, this really beats really beaten down expectations! Party!

So, reality fans, take a good look at the photo in our slide show of an amazing maritime gathering in the South China Sea, and see this.

Back in the day, as in February 2000, or right near the absolute height of the Internet bubble and the global economic boom built upon it, I flew to Singapore to make a presentation on the U.S economy to Asian finance executives, and while sailing through the port for a bit of R&R afterward, I was astounded at the amount of shipping activity going on there.

The point is, those mega-tankers and container ships were sailing in and out, not sitting idly there, as they are now.

Somehow I don't think this is a sign of a robust recovery hard at work. But of course, this photo is only to be seen in the blogosphere, from what I've gleaned. No sign of it, at least, on Bloomberg or Reuters.

Oh, and as for my presentation, I showed the gathering slides of several charts and graphs illustrating how wildly price multiples on tech stocks were out of whack with economic reality. If memory serves, Asian markets closed down big time the next day. Not that I had anything to do with it.