To use one of our own though, the green shoots have been today sprayed with the Agent Orange of investor pessimism, and rather than sprouting blooms of resurgent global finance, are instead creating Venus fly-traps of PAIN! Yes, the much-touted “recession is over” vibes that have been percolating through the world of finance toward the waiting masses have been kiboshed over the last week or so, with investors cashing in on the mini-boom rather than believing it’ll carry on.

Confidence has been high, particularly with financial stocks as a leaner banking sector announced fat profits, but now, as one analyst told the FT, “People are struggling to justify lofty valuations”. “The smartest players in the US stock market – the top insiders who run public companies – are not betting their own money on an economic recovery”, said another. People are now converting stocks into cash, or betting on a fall in their price.

Given the extremely schizo state of various indices recently, this doesn’t spell certain doom for recovery, but unfortunately other indicators seem to point towards the world still being buggered. Unemployment, the main inhibitor of a resurgent economy, is constantly rising, with Seeking Alpha predicting a “protracted bout of nationwide systemic double-digit unemployment” in the States; the UK is faring a bit better, with the unemployment rate declining, though unions are warning that unemployment will continue to rise until the third quarter of 2010, and that this is going to be as bad as the 80s. 

The World Bank has revised its fortune-telling on the recession from what it said in March, and not in the way we want – it’s saying that the global economy will contract 2.9%, rather than the 1.7% it said before. Global trade will drop by nearly 10%, rather than the 6.1% it previously predicted.

And Nouriel Roubini, anointed sage of the financial crisis, is warning of a double dip – a slight rebound (i.e. what’s been happening recently) followed by yet another drop in the global economy. He’s particularly worried about the piles of money that have flooded the world in the form of stimuli and bailouts contributing to rampant inflation.

I can’t help but think the 24-hour news cycle is creating weirdly microcosmic cycles within this recession – the constant information feedback seems to breed an ongoing rupture in predictions, with long-term outlooks being updated every two weeks. Add to that the always-capricious stock market and the national obsession with house prices, and its enough to make you throw your hands up in defeat at trying to suggest an end for all this. It makes you long, as Gordon Brown did at the weekend, for a day with “no news to report”; better that than the cacophonous chaos of a world scrabbling for those green shoots.

It’s going to go under an Initial Public Offering, ie on the stock market, which seems weird considering that the markets’ moods are less predictable than a teenager’s at the moment, and no-one’s been doing any IPOs over the last few months. But the floatation won’t happen until 2010, so it’ll get a headwind of hype and excitement, maybe even a bidding war from buy-out firms prepared to pay over the eventual valuation. Given the popularity already of the Skype iPhone app, we can presume that the brand will be all the stronger come next year. Though Martin Peers at the Wall Street Journal suggests that growth will be limited thanks to calls being free, and that given Skype made $116m profit last year, the $1.7bn that eBay will want for it seems like a lot.

Even if they do get that much for it, it’s still a hefty loss for eBay on their original investment. eBay has also just announced it’s selling back web recommendation service StumbleUpon to its original owners, after they bought it for $75m back in 2007. “We realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses”, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp. So “lack of synergy” seems to be a running theme here – eBay, flush from its brilliant core business, thought it should and could move with the times, or at least be seen to be doing so. But now they’re having to turn back to the auctions, something they should never have strayed from in the first place.

eBay resisted a buyback offer from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who look like an attendee at a caravan trade show and a trance producer respectively; they had pulled together a group of private equity firms to fund the purchase. The Guardian suggests that thanks to a beef over the Global Index technology that the pair licence to Skype, eBay is snubbing Zennstrom and Friis with the IPO. Take that, Scandos!

Maybe Zennstrom and Friis can now concentrate on turning the Joost platform they invested in into a viable TV equivalent of fellow Scandinavian ad-funded success story Spotify. At the moment it’s good for cartoons, the softest of porn, and little else, but surely has the potential to be massive. Maybe they could try and steal the music video market off YouTube while it festers in copyright law hell?

After he expressed faith in America’s banks, shares in those banks rose, particularly in Wells Fargo, whose price jumped nearly 25% after Buffett said they would “come out fine”. Meanwhile, he prompted an increase in American Express, of which he owns 151.6m shares, by saying they were “going to be around forever”. The guy is acknowledging his awesome power and wielding it to shore up his portfolio. After announcing record losses last week, he knew something needed to be done – 3 hours of CNBC coverage later, and he’s right back in the game. Add that to his talk of convening with “animal spirits” and I think we may can presume he’s working on a higher plane.

Despite his rosy picture of an America coming together under the unity bred by strong, Buffett-backed banks, some clearly listened mostly to the doom and gloom at the beginning of his interview. Forbes suggests that both American and Asian stocks were adversely affected by his “cliff” comment; Bloomberg suggested it was the cause of disruption in the European stock market. Whether this is news companies trying to jazz up dry stocks stories with a bit of Buffett twinkle, or the stock markets really are aligned with Buffett’s moods, it’s not clear. But just the idea of a 78-year-old ukelele fan and collector of nuns fingerprints, surrounded by acres of soft furnishings, making pronouncements on the world economy that are not only listened to but devotedly acted upon, is so wonderfully weird that I really want it to be the real driving force behind the world economy.