If the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary gurus — technically, the Open Market Committee — were given to exuberance of the sort some pedants might consider irrational, at the conclusion of last week’s meeting they might have declared the dawning of a decade of growth and prosperity. Central bankers don’t say such things, of course, or even think them. Instead, we get the following: “Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in March suggests that economic activity has continued to strengthen and that the labor market is beginning to improve… Financial market conditions remain supportive of economic growth. Although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be moderate for a time, the Committee anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in the context of price stability.”

So things are looking up for the U.S. economy — light at the end of the tunnel, or even emergence from it. True, the ever-cautious Fed, in support of its decision to keep interest rates close to zero, also said that although household spending is picking up, it is still constrained by “high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit.”