Well I just get back from a long vacation and see another doom and gloomer? While growth won't be around 4.5% all year like its almost certain to be Q1, I see at most a 5% chance of another recession. The only things that could cause it are another major terrorist attack or some Middle East countries or Venezuela completely shutting off the oil spigot. Neither is all that likely. Your GDP assessment is wrong, imports are down but exports are down too. The change between good economic times and bad economic times is almost neglible. While the auto and home purchasing spree did help things out a bit, I don't think we were really in a recession of much magnitude to start, after all it didn't even fit the simplistic definition of it with only one quarter of negative growth. Without the terrorists we wouldn't have had a real recession. Right now there is far too much stimulus to the economy from the Fed and from government spending to have another recession. Our real concern should be inflationary growth because oil prices are going up and the whole world economy suddenly got its feet with even Japan possibly adding a bit of growth (much better than being negative!). The downturn (better name for it) came so quickly it caught a lot of people off-guard and the upturn probably will do the same. I see inflation being fairly troublesome by this time next year, after all unemployment still isn't much of a concern from a historical basis so if business starts hiring late this year, we could see unemployment in the 4's again with a real chance of running high 3's by next summer. That will definitely pick up inflation because the whole world seems likely to participate in the recovery and that fact alone probably will devalue the dollar pretty hard. Falling dollar and low unemployment spell BIG trouble for inflation.