There appear to be two camps forming among financial and economic commentators.
The more numerous faction, which also includes most stock market players, the federal reserve and the administration, flies the green shoots flag.
Its prevailing opinion is that thanks to timely government action another great depression has been avoided, the national and global economies are now reaching bottom and renewed growth is not far away.
Hopes and analyses along these lines have fueled the world stock market rally which began in early March.
The other and smaller group is more cautious and less optimistic.
To them the green shoots are wiggles in the charts and the basic economic numbers do not support the above conclusions.
In fact, the data still points downward and the bottom is not in sight, much less any kind of recovery.
The bullish party rests its analysis on the effectiveness of government intervention, which would have prevented total disaster and is now turning the economy around.
To test this assumption it is worthwhile to reflect on the nature and purpose of government intervention in the economy.
For the sake of clarity one can fit such interventions in either of two categories.
One is a process of nationalization of the whole or of certain parts of the economy.
Such action is based on the assumption that the government will do a better job of running the economy, or selected parts of it, than the private sector .
This is the fundamental assumption of socialism.
The other category of state intervention is regulation, through which the government acts to correct private sector excesses, but without assuming either full control or ownership.
What we have seen in the United States since 2007 fits neither category, but falls right between them.
First, no nationalization has been implemented.
Now, whatever can be said about the benefits and shortcomings of socialism, it is a coherent economic philosophy that has been extensively tried, and in certain cases has achieved the goals set for it.
It is therefore a valid model for certain purposes, but it is not being applied here.
Modification of economic parameters and activities through regulation has also been largely absent.
In fact government intervention in the last two years, although massive, has been primarily aimed at the maintenance and restoration of the status quo ante: getting the financial system to function again, saving the banks too big to fail, restoring the auto industry, returning to growth, and so on.
Vast sums of money have been expended or pledged, but no activities have been forbidden or outlawed, no management purges have taken place, and no new economic strategy formulated.
What has happened is not so much an overhaul of the economy, but a sudden and vast expansion of government into the financial and economic spheres, proceeding mostly on an ad hoc basis.
Because such intervention, while not being a shift to true socialism, nevertheless has a considerable distorting effect on market mechanisms, it is right to ask whether it will ever actually fix the economy.
It is quite possible that it has, in fact, achieved the opposite effect.
On the one hand the market has been shackled and is no longer free to work its way and purge the economy of accumulated dross.
On the other the government is far from having the level of control needed to implement a coherent economic strategy.
The two influences basically cancel each other out.
Aside from being extremely costly, the kind of state intervention we have seen to date is most likely to lead to paralysis, with and an economy that is not so much fixed as frozen in place and unable to move.
To return to the botanical analogy, there are green shoots to be observed in every situation.
The question to be asked is whether they are productive plants, weeds or parasitic growth.
In our present economic situation the latter two appear to dominate.