Economic spring is in the air. The employment numbers, the banking sector and the housing markets have media commentators cheering. Ben Bernanke sees “green shoots” sprouting. “Optimism builds,” the Financial Times says. “[T]he situation has improved dramatically.” Media analysts note that the stock market’s winning streak has extended more than two months—up 30 percent!

Is it time to celebrate and break out the champagne? Caution: Misplaced optimism is common during the early stages of “great recessions.” This recession is looking a lot like 1931. That disastrous year began with green shoots too. More than ever, consumers need to prepare for worse years ahead.

But what has the market so enthused? What has improved? Are employers hiring again? Has America’s decimated banking sector magically returned to health? Have home prices stopped falling?

No. Not yet, but there are “glimmers of hope,” we are told. America’s economic reservoirs are almost dry, mind you, but there is good news: The rate at which they are evaporating might be slowing. Media analysts see this as desert sands budding with green shoots and flowers.

The most recent little green bud of hope was in the April jobs report: Fewer Americans lost jobs than we expected. Yes, official unemployment still rose to its highest rate in 26 years—to 8.9 percent. Yes, we still lost 539,000 jobs. But that was less than the previous month’s 699,000 losses. So the market cheered and commentators speculated that April showers will bring May flowers.

There is no doubt that April’s job numbers were an improvement over March, but losing more than half a million jobs in one month is nothing to get excited about.

Now for the news that might really sunburn you. The actual numbers are worse—perhaps far worse—than reported. April’s employment totals included 66,000 jobs for temporary workers hired by the federal government to conduct the 2010 census. Additionally, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 226,000 jobs were added to the totals due to the famous birth-death model, which claims that jobs are being created which are not detected by surveys due to time lags between establishing a business and reporting new hires.

New business creation in this environment? With the bank credit pipelines bone-dry? Not likely.

Take back out the temporary government jobs and the largely fictional birth-death jobs and, as analyst John Mauldin noted, the real number of jobs lost in April is probably well over 600,000. Mauldin also notes that when you include those people who are working part-time but want full-time work, as well as those people who are unemployed but haven’t looked for a job in the preceding four weeks, the national unemployment rate (U-6) shoots up to an ugly 15.8 percent.

The fact that April’s sketchy jobs report is somehow construed as positive news is, as some farmers say, a good sign of a bad sign.

But sometimes it doesn’t take much for people to grasp on to for hope. For example, railroad Union Pacific’s stock has jumped from $30 to $50 per share since March. Why? Are carloadings up? Has profitability surged? Are Americans buying more things? “On the contrary,” says Stephen Lieber, Alpine Dynamic Balance’s chief investment officer. “[C]arloadings are sharply down from a year ago.” Profitability is down too. So why are people buying? Because, says Lieber, “we know this economy will recover, and when it does, Union Pacific will take those unused cars, fill them up and cash will flow out.”

But how does Lieber know the economy will recover in time? Because the American economy always has.

Lieber is not alone, and prices are shooting up for more than just railroad stocks. Analysts see green shoots popping up all over America’s banking sector.

April was Wall Street’s best month in nine years. The banking sector, formerly death incarnate, is soaring: Citigroup is up 280 percent from its lows, Bank of America up 184 percent, Goldman Sachs up 154 percent—and the buds of new life go on and on.

Have these deathly ill banks—which threatened the entire U.S. and global economy—suddenly been miraculously healed? Are spring showers sprinkling their baked, ashen leaves and satiating their thirsty roots?

No. Two big mirages have combined to make truly dead plants seem like sweet-smelling flowers. And I’m not talking about the multibillion-dollar bailouts and guarantees that made every taxpayer in the nation responsible for the banks’ bad investments.

The first was the government’s much-hyped “stress test,” which revealed this: A few banks need to raise some money, but by and large all are just fine.

Unfortunately, the “stress test” wasn’t that stressful. It would have been a shock if any bank received a failing grade, since the government has made it its business and risked trillions to prevent those banks from failing.

As Paul Krugman wrote for the New York Times, “The regulators didn’t have the resources to make a really careful assessment of the banks’ assets, and in any case they allowed the banks to bargain over what the results would say” (emphasis mine).

I am guessing that a lot of high school math students would like to “bargain” over what their final exam grades say.

Mauldin notes that the Treasury used a worst-case unemployment scenario of only 9.5 percent in the bank stress tests. He also noted we are on track to hit 10 percent by the end of this year. So much for the validity of the Treasury’s stress test. Says Krugman, “A rigorous audit it wasn’t.” How could regulators put the banking system under the heat lamp when Wall Street is already shriveled up and ready to blow away?

The second event that helped send some investors back to the banks was the government’s decision to change the “mark to market” accounting rules—rules that were designed to keep banks honest and protect investors.

The big banks were facing insolvency because their mortgage and risky derivative investments had plunged in value. So the government decided that to help the banks, it would allow them to stop reporting what the true market value of their investments was. Instead, banks can now develop their own internally generated formulas to come up with values for their investments based upon what they “should” be worth in “normal” market conditions.

Voilà. Suddenly an oasis appears on the horizon. Suddenly banks look much healthier, saturated with profitability. In reality, these same banks still have the same assets and the same monstrous liabilities. But all of a sudden—on paper—things don’t look so bad. Thus, unsuspecting investors buy their seemingly undervalued stock, the misplaced euphoria spreads and the stock market soars. It’s a new bull market, we are told.

With the housing market too, analysts boldly claim that at least we have now reached the bottom, and it’s generally upward growth from here. The proof: This month’s data, although negative, isn’t quite as negative as the previous month’s. Real estate is still deflating, but in some locations, more slowly. Mortgage defaults continue to grow, but are no longer smashing records. Housing inventories remain near all-time highs, but have fallen slightly. Lending standards are still tightening, but the government is moving toward using taxpayer money to ease mortgage terms so risky borrowers can buy homes they can’t afford again.

In other words, we are still drying up, but not with such catastrophic rapidity. Therefore, many media analysts and their real-estate and stock market counterparts would have you believe that we must be on the verge of recovery. This is like passengers on the Titanic saying, “The water is still rising, but not as fast; so don’t worry, everything will soon be back to normal.”

The truth is that “normal” is gone for good.

The trillions of dollars the government has spent combating the economic meltdown will prove as transitory as a cloud burst over the desert.

Oh the money will have an effect. You can’t pour $13 trillion into an economy and not have some kind of an effect. A few investment bankers, like those handling the Chrysler-Fiat deal, will rake in the dough. But for the vast majority, the stimulus will prove to be temporary, simply because the money is temporary. Businesses are not going to invest, to increase production and capacity based upon the hope that the government will be able to borrow ever increasing record amounts of money to rain down upon people for “free.” Consumers won’t borrow and spend more money on the hope the government will send out more stimulus checks—especially when they are unemployed.

Government stimulus dollars may saturate economic conditions for a while. Things may temporarily appear to get better, but like a field of pastel desert flowers after a thundershower, those economic blossoms won’t last long. And all that will remain will be sand dunes stretching to the horizon.

“‘Green shoots’ can only be brought to harvest through real productivity,” says analyst Gerald Celente. “Pumping gigantic sums of money into too-big-to-fail financial institutions to jump-start the lending/borrowing cycle is to perpetuate a failed economic model.”

Yes, given enough water a desert will blossom. But as soon as the water goes away, and the blazing sun bakes the earth, the plants wither and die. They don’t have deep enough roots to last until the next spring. And if you don’t have proper roots, you can’t produce meaningful fruit.

Sadly, America does not have the roots needed to survive. Therefore no meaningful recovery is possible.

God gave America a law—a code of morals, ethics and commandments to live by. This biblical set of principles was the roots that were to allow America to prosper and produce fruit. But America has turned its back on God. And it has turned its back on the source of that law—the one true Root that can bring peace and prosperity.

Consequently, God says that “as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 5:24).

“Give them according to their deeds,” says God. “[R]ender to them their desert” (Psalm 28:4).

America’s economy is about to become a fruitless desert.

Are you fully tapped into the one secure Root that can anchor and nourish you during these difficult economic times? Enroll today in the Herbert W. Armstrong College Bible Correspondence Course. It’s absolutely free to you, paid for by the generous contributions of others.