What's clear is there was a lot less to the GDP number than what lit up the bulls' eyes.

Declarations of the end of the recession may be premature. All recessions in the past four decades have had at least one positive quarter for GDP, followed by a renewed downturn, points out John Williams, who produces the Shadow Government Statistics (www.shadowstats.com) for his subscribers, who suspect there may be more (or less) to the numbers the government churns out.

Indeed, he writes, some 92% of the third quarter's GDP growth came from non-recurring factors and thus are not sustainable. (Funny how the stock market will ignore non-recurring factors in corporate earnings reports but took those in the GDP report at face value.)