There’s also hope for the hard-hit financial sector. A new bank-rescue plan to be announced Monday will probably guarantee a bunch of toxic assets. At the same time, the Fed is stepping up its efforts to refinance asset-backed bonds for banks, consumer-finance companies, and hedge funds in the secondary markets.

And while the quantity of money is rising significantly, the quality of credit is improving, too. All the credit-fear indicators -- from LIBOR all the way out to corporate-bond spreads -- have declined substantially.

Meanwhile, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis told CNBC on Friday that he can get out from under TARP in three years. There will be no nationalization. Lewis also said his firm’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch will be successfully executed over time. So it’s no surprise that bank stocks were one of the leaders in Friday’s huge rally.

With all the fiscal mania and Keynesian government-spending-multiplier talk in Washington these days, most folks have forgotten Milton Friedman’s dictum that money matters. Indeed, money growth could well produce the biggest economic surprise this year. And as Art Laffer has taught us all, taxes also matter -- a lot. In fact, the only real stimulative part of the behemoth stimulus package is the simple fact that marginal tax rates will not be raised.

So cheaper energy, bundles of new money creation, zero inflation, and no tax hikes could very well combine to produce a stronger economy as the year progresses -- to the great surprise of the majority of economic pundits. That may well be the message of Friday’s stock market rally, which shrugged off yesterday’s painful slide in jobs.