DENVER (MarketWatch) — Economics policy guru Robert J. Shapiro walked into the White House in 2010: “They said, ‘We think we’re really recovering.’ And I said, “Don’t believe it.’”

Extraordinary economic stimuli created the illusion of a recovery, he explained. Consumers and businesses were still loaded with debt and still reeling from losses after the 2008 financial crisis.

WSJ/NBC poll: Republican support fizzling

“Three times we’ve had the economy look like it’s coming back and then it stalled out,” Shapiro said in a telephone interview.

These disappointments came in 2010, 2011 and yet again in 2012, when the economy surprisingly contracted in the fourth quarter. Despite that downturn, there’s even more talk of recovery in 2013, but this time Shapiro isn’t shouting it down.

“I was a pessimist for years,” he said. “Now, I’m an optimist.”

Shapiro served as undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs under President Bill Clinton, and is now chairman of a private financial consultancy, Sonecon LLC. He’s also an adviser to the International Monetary Fund and blogs about economic issues at www.sonecon.com. Read Shapiro’s ‘Dark Thoughts on the Coming Sequester’.

“The pieces for a recovery are in place,” he said.

Robert Shapiro, economist and chairman of Sonecon.

Let’s see: Europe and Japan are in recession; China’s growth is slowing; Washington is threatening a sequester showdown; Americans’ paychecks just got smaller after a temporary cut in the payroll tax expired; taxes for the rich increased, too; Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, is warning of disappointing sales growth; we’ve just had one quarter of economic contraction. But Mr. Pessimist has now turned optimist?

Shapiro says the fourth-quarter shrinkage was a fluke, much of it due to a decline in defense spending, and he isn’t alone in his outlook.

On Monday, the National Association for Business Economics released a survey of 49 other economists with the consensus view that the economy will grow 2.4% this year and 3% next year. It’s not staggering growth, but it’s not the recession scenario, either. Who knows? It may even create at least a few jobs.

Economists surveyed expect the unemployment rate to average 7.7% in 2013 and 7.2% in 2014. This, at least, is an improvement over 8.1% in 2012.

After four years of an on-again/off-again recovery, the big question that remains unanswered is: Can the economy genuinely recover by printing more money and lowering interest rates as the Federal Reserve has attempted?

“It hasn’t worked ... yet,” Shapiro concedes.

“We went through the worst financial crisis in over 85 years. We wiped out an enormous share of the personal wealth of the majority of Americans. You have to expect that it’s not going to come back easily or quickly, and it hasn’t.”

Shapiro said the recovery might have taken hold sooner if Washington had done more to help struggling homeowners from the very beginning. He had proposed low-interest, government-backed bridge loans to carry homeowners through the crisis. In exchange, homeowners would have given up a percentage of any capital gains they earned once they were able to sell their homes.

Stemming the mortgage crisis would have helped banks and the rest of the economy, too. The problem, however, was political. Hard-working Americans who did not face a mortgage foreclosure themselves would resent bailing out those who did. “They never figured out a way to get past that political problem,” Shapiro said.

So Wall Street got a bailout and Main Street did not. The good news, though, is that by now consumers and business have been able to shed most of their excess debt. “That creates a strong foundation for a revival in consumer and business spending,” Shapiro said.

The housing market, which triggered the crisis, is also beginning to improve, albeit slowly, and this will juice the economy, too.

All the global economic crisis scenarios — many of which I’ve presented in this column — assume that the Fed or the government won’t be able to adequately respond to a challenge, Shapiro said. Recent history, he argues, has shown otherwise. The Great Depression Part II was averted.

From here, Shapiro predicts we’ll get through the sequester debate without much damage to the economy, despite what you’ll read in the headlines this week. The automatic and arbitrary cuts to the federal budget will eventually be replaced with something sensible.

“Politically, when both sides don’t want something to happen, it usually doesn’t,” he said. “They may initiate the sequester before they stop it, but I don’t believe it will go on for very long.”

Consensus that was not possible in Washington before the last election will be easier to achieve now. “That’s mainly because the president is so much stronger politically than the Republicans,” Shapiro said. “His strength comes from the fact that his position is very similar to the consensus position out in the country. The Republicans don’t have a lot of options.”

One way or another, they’re just going to have to let the economy recover.