and obviously, nothing happened.

Re: "good" news.  Financial market players are always trying to anticipate, to look ahead.  So when they expect "catastrophic" news and it turns out to be merely "awful" news, relatively speaking it is "better" than what they anticipated before, so the market rallies.  That's what happened with the housing data this week.  Google "The mess that Greenspan made" blog, and you'll see a confirmed housing bear make this point.

Durable goods, a leading indicator for the economy, was an unalloyed positive.  Manufacturing has not been doing that well, so a big if one-month surge in manufacturing activity contra-indicates a recession.  If we do get a recession, it will be consumer-led, so I am most interested in retail sales (still weakly positive year-over-year) and weekly jobless claims (currently running at about 320,000/week.  For a recession you'd have to have about 350,000+/week on a consistent basis).

Cheers.