So the recession is over.

Huzzah! And the peasants rejoice!

If that sounds sour, it is.

Maybe it's slogging through the slop for six weeks of one of the rainiest autumns on record. Maybe it's watching people work two and three jobs to keep their heads above another sort of heavy water. Maybe it's just a lifelong bad attitude.

But I'm not feeling recovered.

The happy talk started in late spring. The stock market was up from some sub-prime-sucking lows in March. The investor class was already back to its usual buzz: You're missing out! Jump back in stocks! You're missing out!

But the weather was pretty drizzly then, too. From my ground-level perspective, there hadn't been anything substantial done to fix the financial sector other than bailing out the big guys. And running a jaundiced eye through the Monday paper, the bankruptcy list seemed to be growing. On June 8, there were 41 of them. That included more than $450,000 in liabilities listed for a logging company, more than $1 million for a lumber company - and more than $15 million for a single Realtor.

Somehow - call me stupid - my buzz was killed. Missing out didn't seem quite as important as stashing cash.

Over the last four months, the markets have indeed continued to go up. But so have the number of bankruptcies. Just for non-grins, I flagged a few no-longer-high-flyers.

In early September, that included a financial consultant. (Hello?) In late September, that included another Realtor, for more than $5.3 million.

So the stock market touches 10,000 points again in October . . . and there are 235 bankruptcies listed in the paper. That includes a home builder for more than $2.2 million and a development company for more than $1.3 million.

And the recession is over?

Since sub-prime lending and the housing market got the nation into this mess - and a lot of financial/housing-related folks were going belly-up here - I bounced this off somebody who has been in the business a long time. Growing up with P&W Builders, which started here in 1954, David Whitehurst has seen more than a few booms bust.

"They always do," he says. "Anything that goes up that fast is going to fall."

He says the grass doesn't even look greener on the other side of the fence: Everyone is getting hurt. On the other hand, this is nothing compared to the 1980s.

"Not even close," he says.

At that point, P&W had work for only two carpenters, and mortgages ran 18 percent. They've got a lot more people working now, and those who can get financing can find it for less than 5 percent.

That sounds encouraging. There can be a lot of reasons people go bankrupt besides the economy. Whitehurst thinks the newspaper can be too negative. I'd like to be a bit more chipper myself. But he has also heard rumors that more bankruptcies are in the offing.

So I checked my gut feeling. As of Oct. 2, the latest figures available, there have been 3,199 bankruptcies in Peoria this year. There were 3,561 in all of 2008; 2,925 in 2007.

That's not as high as 2005, when there were 7,657 bankruptcies after a change in the laws. But it is more than every year in the 1980s, when 1986 posted the highest numbers with 3,190. For the whole year.

Bankruptcy trustee and attorney Charles Covey says the big cases this year are in housing and real estate. He can't predict the future. But in the present, the caseload is starting to creep up the socio-economic ladder.

"Now I'm seeing middle class people where there's a job loss," he says. "Some are getting called back. There's an uptick in recalls."

On the other hand, we also learned this week that another 2,500 people will not be recalled to Caterpillar Inc.

So the recession is over. For whom? 

Peoria Journal Star columnist Terry Bibo can be reached at (309) 686-3189 or tbibo@pjstar.com.