An improving job market, rising stock prices and easier credit are combining to lift U.S. consumer confidence and spending, with optimism measured by the Bloomberg Comfort Index near a four-year high. Personal-consumption expenditures increased by the most in seven months in February, rising 0.8 percent, the Commerce Department said last week.

Marketwatch.com - Greg Robb - There was less interest in another round of bond buys at the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting in March, according to the minutes released on Tuesday.

At the meeting, only a couple of members suggested that more “quantitative easing” as the policy is commonly known could become necessary if the economy lost momentum.

At the previous policy meeting in January, a “few” Fed members thought the central bank could start adding more long-term securities before long and “a number of participants” indicated they were open to the idea if the economic outlook deteriorated.

Calculated Risk - ADP reports: Employment in the U.S. nonfarm private business sector increased by 209,000 from February to March on a seasonally adjusted basis. Estimated gains for previous months were revised higher; the gain from December to January was revised up by 9,000 to 182,000, and the gain from January to February was revised up by 14,000 to 230,000.

Employment in the private, service-providing sector increased 164,000 in March, after rising a revised 183,000 in February. Employment in the private, goods-producing sector rose 45,000 in March. Manufacturing employment added 23,000 jobs.

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Some regions that were excessively frothy during the boom — California, Las Vegas, South Florida and Arizona — have seen much greater price drops. Other areas had laws (Texas) or other financial conventions (New York City) that mandated significant down payments and other prudent requirements avoided much of the bloodshed. These regions did not see the same speculative silliness to the upside and hence have been spared the madness to the downside.

Not long ago, their options were abundant, as seen at a Garden City, N.Y., shopping center where a Springleaf Finance Inc. branch sits across a parking lot from competitor OneMain Financial, a unit of Citigroup Inc.

The upswing is tied to an increase in applications for both home purchases and refinancings, according to the latest Mortgage Bankers Association market composite index.

The use of rudimentary containers to ship cargo began in the late 17th century. By the 1950s, Malcolm McLean of Sea-Land Shipping, pushed by the U.S. military to standardize their design, was building strong, uniform, theft-resistant, stackable shipping containers that were easy to load and unload by truck, rail and ship, and easy to store.

But even so, conflicting reports exist about the state of affairs to the north. So I contacted David Madani, Canada economist at Capital Economics.

“We think it is a bubble. All the warnings signs are flashing,” he said, citing high house prices relative to incomes and rents, the upswing in homeownership rates, excessive household debt and overbuilding.

"We feel higher gas prices are accelerating sales, not hurting sales," AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson told CNBC Tuesday. "The industry has gone all-in on efficiency on all vehicles and people are walking in and see they don’t have to give up on size or performance to get 20 percent fuel efficiency."

CoreLogic - Notes: This CoreLogic House Price Index report is for February. The Case-Shiller index released last week was for January. Case-Shiller is currently the most followed house price index, however CoreLogic is used by the Federal Reserve and is followed by many analysts. The CoreLogic HPI is a three month weighted average of the last three months and is not seasonally adjusted (NSA).

But a new report suggests we ought to take claims of regulatory-related unemployment with a grain of salt. The Institute for Political Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank associated with the New York University School of Law, finds many of the studies purporting to show mass job losses -- or gains -- from environmental rules use poorly executed economic models that do not accurately measure true costs and benefits.