On the basis that no one ever got fired for agreeing with the boss, let me continue yesterday's list, started by the Business Editor, of indicators that things might not be quite as bad as they might seem. Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 2, then.

Let us first veer around the train wreck that is British public finances. No one in the City thought that Alistair Darling was playing with a terribly strong hand. No one much believed in those fiscal rules anyway, given how much debt is off balance sheet. So let us play Pollyanna. All this might look absurdly optimistic in months, maybe weeks, I am the first to admit. But ...

The British banks have got their money. Bradford & Bingley has cleared its £400 million rights issue, admittedly on terms that make it probably the most expensive ever, with £55 million going to the underwriters. Still, these are the same City banks suffering elsewhere; think of it as recycling.

At Barclays, the Qataris are now the bank's biggest shareholders. At HBOS, it looks like about half has been left with the underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley and Dresdner Kleinwort. In both cases, the price at which the issue was underwritten does not compare too unfavourably with the price in the market. No one has been comprehensively stuffed with worthless equity.

Assume, and it is a big assumption though one shared by some analysts, that this is the nadir for UK banking, then the forced acquisition of so much equity might look like quite a shrewd move a few months hence.

The oil price, despite yesterday's blip, is in decline, North Sea Brent down 6 per cent over the past fortnight. Assume no escalation of hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz. If Chinese demand is coming off the boil, and if any degree of that oil price bubble is down to speculation, the price could unravel quite quickly from now.

The FTSE 100 fell heavily on Monday and Tuesday, fell slightly on Wednesday, and has ended well into positive territory since then. It's not necessarily a trend, but ...

Back in the real world, Google, Microsoft, Intel, eBay and IBM all reported earnings figures at the tail end of this week. These are huge corporations embedded in the knowledge economy. More than half of all business investment in the US is spent on computers, software and networks. Trading is tough, undeniably. But none of their statements suggested they are about to shed loads of jobs.

Google earnings were within a whisker of Wall Street expectations; Microsoft still reckons it can grow sales by 11per cent next year. It doesn't sound like a mega-recession. While most of these companies are heavily exposed to the gloomy American shopper - Intel makes the chips for mobile phones, laptops, and digital cameras, for example - each has benefited from the weak US dollar.

And half of Wall Street reported this week. JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup produced figures that showed no horrible surprises, and both were cautiously upbeat.

Yes, there is inflation, the UK housing market, the US housing market, the bombed-out US automotive industry, airlines that are operating on an extinct business model, the fact that a quarter of the British high street is probably surplus to requirements.

Yet the past decade and a half have seen one of the most extraordinary and extended booms in history. It is essential that we grasp this fact, because much of the work force can remember nothing else and has no basis for comparison; by some measures, you probably have to go back to the early years of Queen Victoria to see its like. It was always going to come to an end. Talk of no recovery in the UK until 2010 actually means that 15 years of boom will have been followed by just two years of bust.

Maybe the downturn will not be quite that vicious and sustained.

Maybe.

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