Investors' hearty appetite for any good economic news is filling the stock market with the equivalent of empty calories. Our pundits say that the economy is indeed improving on a slow and incremental basis, but they also warn that the path to stability and the path to growth are getting conflated in a classic bear market rally.

Stocks tailed off a six-day winning streak to sputter at the end of the week, which was marked by an uptick in existing home sales and new housing starts and a decrease in the number of new jobless claims. However, consumer spending showed little upward movement, nationwide unemployment remained at 9.4% for July, and Friday saw the worst reading of the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment since April.

In short, the recovery will have a long, choppy beginning, said Strategas Research Partners chief economist Don Rissmiller. "There has been a cyclical bounce in productivity, which is normal for the beginning of a recovery," Rissmiller wrote in an Aug. 23 note. "Given enough cost cutting, firms can become profitable for a while. If we're going to see sustained gains, however, investment likely has to pick up considerably."

What's happened in the stock market is an overeager buying spree. It's been encouraged by investors who want positive earnings numbers created by severe cost cuts to serve as a substitute for real growth, and that simply isn't sustainable in the short term.

Morgan Keegan economist Donald Ratajczak raised the question of what happens when the benefits of massive government stimulus plans fade. They've been a factor in many of the positive economic data that's fueled the recent stock rally, from the Cash for Clunkers auto rebate program that ended on Aug. 24 to the homebuyer tax credit incentive set to expire in November.

"While I don't want to discourage investors, about half this full bull run probably already has been completed," Ratajczak wrote in an Aug. 24 note.

For Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, this recovery drama is familiar -- and it's still in its first act. The economy usually gets out of recessions once inventory liquidation has run its course, he says, after production is cut ahead of declining sales.

"Sales stop declining, and then start rebounding usually in response to stimulative monetary and fiscal policies," Yardeni wrote on Thursday. "During the recession, businesses also slash employment and capital spending. Such cost cutting tends to boost profit margins. It doesn t take much of a rebound in sales to trigger a revival in corporate profits, which then stimulates a cyclical upswing in business hiring and spending."

John Challenger, CEO of global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, doesn't see the hiring upswing happening tomorrow but said unemployment will decrease as part of a "slow crawl toward economic recovery."

"While it is too soon to expect a massive hiring binge that will move some of the nearly 20 million jobless Americans back onto payrolls, the pace of job cuts is likely to continue its downward trend," Challenger said on Wednesday.

For some longer-term perspective, Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg put the recent market surge in context.

"We are now five months in this bear market rally, and up 50% on the S&P 500, and yet the big picture reality is that the S&P 500 is no higher today than it was on February 18, 1998," Rosenberg wrote on Thursday. "Even with this flashy 50% rally and whatever dividend you reinvested, the total return in the S&P 500 since December 1998 is almost, to the second decimal place, 0%."