TIM CAVANAUGH: Summer of Recovery Dog Days. “I haven’t been checking in with Bill McBride’s Calculated Risk much lately, so it was instructive just now to spend an hour on the blog and realize how uniformly dismal the economic news is.”

Plus this: “Things have gotten so slow that Wall Street traders are giving up coke for pot. Note that, according to the White House itself, we have already enjoyed most of the benefits of the $787 billion ARRA Stimulus. These benefits seem to have consisted of making signs to tell people about the stimulus.”