If you’ve been watching financial markets for the past three weeks, they’re now emphatically telling us the recession is over and it’s all smooth sailing from here on.

No one ever wants to be the one guy bucking the crowd, which someone ends up doing during every market upswing. (That’s also the answer to the perennial but stupid question people ask during every bust: why didn’t you see this coming?) Consequently, you’re even starting to hear recent bears like Alan Greenspan and Nouriel Roubini say that an economic recovery is just around the corner. Nobody pays attention to you (or pays you consulting fees) when you’re saying what no one wants to hear.

What are the sources of the imminent recovery? For one thing, the economic statistics will show recovery as soon as the economy stops falling. That’s because GDP and other statistics are measured on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Compare this quarter to Q3 ’08 and it will look horrible. Compare it to Q2 ’09 and it won’t look bad. The change might even be positive.

But if there is to be real economic growth, where will it come from? The hunch is that China and other emerging economies are now growing robustly again. But since those economies are export-driven (although China has had a lot of government stimulus recently), they need a source of demand in order to sustain growth.

The U.S. consumer has traditionally provided that demand. But consumer demand is now down by about 2 percent from its peak in 2007. So far, the Cash for Clunkers program is the only measure shown to increase it, and that’s a government subsidy. That point contains the answer to the overall question. The U.S. government, through massive deficit spending, is providing the final demand that could be powering the beginning of a global recovery. Keynesianism is working.

This is borne out in the Commerce Department’s initial reading of Q2 GDP, which was released last Friday. It shows very significant increases in government spending, notably in the defense sector, as Obama steps up the war in Afghanistan.

In essence, public demand is replacing private demand in the global economic mix, and you have to ask yourself whether this development is sustainable. For a clue, remember that U.S. final demand from the mid-90s until 2007 was sustained well above trend by a strong increase in cheap credit available to consumers. Credit-fueled growth is obviously over and done with, but one borrower is still not having the slightest bit of trouble accessing credit at quite affordable rates of interest. Who? The U.S. Treasury, of course.

We’ve started inflating another asset bubble by financing economic activity with the same dynamic that led to the Internet bust and the Great Recession. The place right now where I see certain asset prices growing to borderline unreasonable levels is in high-rated corporate bonds. Watch them. Many are now pricing at spreads comparable to Treasury rates that are inside LIBOR.

So that’s one overall risk factor. Another is that inflation still remains a complete question mark. According to current inflation measures, real interest rates (nominal rates minus inflation) are at historically high levels, which squares up with the lack of private-sector growth. If the private sector recovers, we’ll be facing quite a mess on the inflation front.

In a perverse way, this situation could give Obama a reason to keep the private sector from recovering strongly. Slow growth on the private front would render the incipient government-led recovery more sustainable. It would also explain the sudden talk of middle-class tax increases from Tim Geithner.