The cat let out of the bag last week — a frazzled, flaming, rabid, death-dealing cat — was the news that Goldman Sachs announced impressive second-quarter profits, and set aside $18 billion or so for employee bonuses averaging $600,000 per head (though, of course, not evenly distributed among them).

At the risk of confirming my critics’ dumbest charge — that I am a “doomer” — the mandate of clarity requires me to ask: to what state of affairs do we expect to recover?