Close your eyes and think of recovery

Jeremy Thomas: To get a feel for the mood of the market, sometimes it's best to ignore the financial media altogether. It's hard, I know, because it's addictive: the non-stop rush of data, the breathless efforts to explain every blip in every chart, the eternal scrambling to find the overarching "big picture".

There is no doubting the entertainment value of clocking in to marketwatch.com every day, as much for its 24-hour vigilance (other websites go to sleep when the US does) as for the babble of dissonant argument that rages under every story.

But there comes a time when the thrill of having a live Reuters news feed pales, when the sound of yet another talking head on CNBC or Summit makes your fingers itch to find a suitable club or rock. Time, in fact, to put away the purveyors of finance-porn and pick up something far more likely to give you some idea of where we are.

I'm talking about common-or-garden "lifestyle" magazines. I like to keep an eye on the US editions of Esquire and GQ. Both publications have been keen followers of the financial troubles, printing their share of exposés of the shenanigans and profiles of the villains, but of late they've shown a noticeable cooling off in interest. It's as if they've said they're sick and tired of all the nonsense.

Indeed, the editor of Esquire went on record to say he's grown weary of the "yelling", of everyone and his brother or barber having an opinion on what's happened and what's happening next. Most grim of all, he said, was the endless forecasting. If only the experts would just shut up, he said, we'd be able to get on with trying to find a way out of the mess.

The GQ editor, prone to a bit more cynicism, has allowed his staff to have a little fun. A recent edition featured a sly debagging of the most famous economist of our time, Dr Doom - otherwise known as Nouriel Roubini - who is noted mainly for predicting the crash of 2008.

A journalist had followed the dismal scientist around since before the markets turned bullish in March 2009. By the time he came to write his story, of course, there'd been at least eight months of "green shoots" poking through the dried mud of the stock market. The interview with Roubini, then, couldn't help but be a snickering ho-ho-ho about how wrong the guru had been. Being honest Joes, though, GQ made it quite clear that Roubini hadn't changed his tune. He was as bearish as ever - even while the rest of the world tried to prove him wrong.

If one sets aside the clamour of "informed" opinion, delivered by the second via the dedicated financial media, there are two possible lessons to learn from Esquire and GQ.

First, it really does seem as if rank-and-file investors are determined to ignore the pessimistic "experts" - and they demonstrated their vainglorious faith in the world's economy by kicking into gear a mini bull market last year.

Second, no matter how much fun the rabble may make of the informed pundits, nobody's too convinced about the recovery - and, worryingly, Dr Doom hasn't yet let up on his deathwatch.