On any rational assessment, the popular new president is skating on thin ice. Pollyanna bulletins about the economy puff up from the White House and Federal Reserve, like auguries of a new pope through the Vatican chimney. "Habemus spem." We have hope. We've just heard it from President Obama: "We are starting to see glimmers of hope across the economy." From Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who's so far unleashed $12 trillion in booster money, we get the always-sinister reassurance, like Death giving the Appointee in Samarra a friendly tap on the shoulder, "the foundations of our economy are strong."

The economic news in the near and medium term is ghastly. Retail sales crashed again in March, nowhere worse than in the car market, though electronics and building materials were way off, too. They now reckon there'll be just over 2 million housing foreclosures in 2009, up 400,000 from 2008. Industrial output is going through the floor at an annual rate of 20 percent, the biggest quarterly drop since the end of the Second World War. U.S. industry is now running at only 70 percent of capacity, the worst number since they started tracking this stat in 1967. Job losses are currently running at 650,000 a month.

Round the next corner are credit card delinquency and the long-heralded slump in commercial real estate, where vacancy rates are already running at 15 percent. Capital One, a huge issuer of Visa and MasterCard, just said the annualized net charge-off rate for U.S. credit cards — debts the company reckons will never be paid — rose to 9.33 percent in March from 8.06 percent in February. In other words, Capital One — whose credit card promotions take up hefty space in the mailbag of every U.S. postman — is in big trouble, and about one in 10 of these credit card holders will have a messed up credit rating for several years to come.

Wall Street and its boosters are trying to pretend that indeed the worst is over. The Dow and S&P Index have been rallying for five weeks. Wells Fargo, the huge San Francisco-based bank, second-biggest home lender, announced that first-quarter net income rose 50 percent to $3 billion. No one seriously believes the bank is in anything other than continuing huge trouble, and will soon need — so Bloomberg News surmises — $50 billion to settle near-term commitments. The profit figure stems from newly relaxed rules about the valuation of Wells Fargo's assets.

In other words, it's thin economic ice from here to the horizon. Robert Reich, now teaching economics at U.C. Berkeley and formerly labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote a piece recently, titled "Why We're Not at the Beginning of the End, and Probably Not Even at the End of the Beginning." There are huge problems with the whole orientation of the U.S. economy. The "free market" outsourcing model has failed. Even at the best of times the U.S. consumers, who account for over 70 percent of all economic activity in the country, don't have purchasing power to keep the whole show on the road, unless they put it on the credit cards that are now maxed out and going into default, or borrow on houses they can't afford.

Amid a hail of well-founded criticism from liberal and conservative economists alike, Obama, with Geithner, Summers and Bernanke at his elbow, remains absolutely committed to giving the bankers everything they ask for, trillion upon trillion. As William Black, deputy director at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the thrift crisis of the 1980s, recently remarked in an acrid interview in Barron's (reprinted here last week): "Unless the current administration changes course pretty drastically, the scandal will destroy Obama's administration, both economically and in terms of integrity. We have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets. How can it result in anything but failure?"

In foreign policy, the ice is just as treacherous. As the nation emerges from its disastrous adventure in Iraq, Obama redeploys to the Afghan-Pakistan theater. Whether it's a sell-out of Haiti's poor or acquiescence in Israel's grim plans for the Palestinians, Obama's game is strictly business as usual, up to and including the Cuban blockade. As under Bush, enemy combatants languish without rights or recourse in prisons like Bagram. Electronic eavesdropping continues unabated. It seems Obama and his attorney general are welshing on commitments not to harass medical marijuana operations in states where local laws sanction such activity.

The labor movement has already seen defeat for its cherished "card check" bill, designed to win a level playing field for union organizers, thus presumptively boosting effective purchasing power among working people, vital to the nation's economic well-being. Will the liberal left mutiny? Never.

Obama's polling numbers remain good. He has only to say there are "glimmers of hope" and the pollsters duly find increasing sentiment among Americans that they feel the economy is moving in a "positive" direction. He gets good assessments from Democrats and Independents.

Obama's lucky to have succeeded a terrible president. He gets out a lot and talks a great game. His problem is the same as the country's. The economic ice is cracking under his feet, and the "stimulus" is going to be about as efficacious as those cushions under the seats the flight attendants assure us are going to come in handy when the plane goes down in the North Atlantic.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.