Is the long night ending?

BOSTON — Is it safe to exhale?

It felt like it this week, as the U.S. unemployment rate edged down to 9.4 percent in July — its first decline in 15 months.

Employers cut jobs in July at the slowest rate in almost a year (though that's little consolation to the 247,000 Americans who were pink-slipped last month).

Both of these figures were pleasant surprises. Most economists thought America's unemployment rate would go up again, and that employers would slash 320,000 jobs.

So, to use the technical term: phew.

But jobs aren't the only source of relief lately.

Last week we learned the world's largest economy shrank at a pace of only 1 percent between April and June. That's good news. If you can bear to remember, it contracted 6.4 percent in the previous quarter — a sickening rate and its worst showing in 27 years.

The U.S. housing market is also showing signs of life. Last week the closely watched Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller index marked the first rise in home prices in three years, suggesting, perhaps, the worst may be over for this battered engine of the economy. Corporate profits are getting better, too: U.S. banks are back to making gobs of money and even AIG — last year's corporate villain — this week announced its first profit in two years. Toss in rising auto sales thanks to the government's wildly popular "Cash for Clunkers" program, (refueled by an additional $2 billion from Congress this week), plus an ebullient mood on Wall Street and it's almost starting to feel like the good old days.

There are even quiet, hopeful murmurs that the U.S. recession may have, in fact, already ended.

""We saw it happen two weeks ago — it's over," economist Dennis Gartman said in an interview with Fortune Investor Daily, pointing to improvements in two data points: weekly jobless claims, and a ratio from the Conference Board that divides coincident economic indicators (in English: real time data like industrial production and personal income) by lagging ones, such as unemployment.