The Fed’s bond-buying efforts have not prevented long-term interest rates from rising  a phenomenon that is interpreted by optimists as a reaction to higher growth and by pessimists as a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the central bank’s efforts and the potential for inflation.

And for most of the roughly eight million Americans who have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007, it hardly feels like a recovery.

The unemployment rate remains at its highest level since the early 1980s; it rose to 9.8 percent this month and is likely to remain above 9 percent through all of next year, confirming the view that the United States is in another jobless recovery like the ones that followed the last two recessions, in 1990-91 and in 2001.

“Historically, unemployment rates come down slowly, so even with 4 percent growth, you would expect to see the unemployment rate come down maybe a percentage point a year, probably less,” said Alan B. Krueger, who was the Treasury Department’s top economist until last month when he returned to Princeton. “Given how high the unemployment rate is, that’s going to seem very slow.”

Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University and a member of the committee that sets the start and end dates of business cycles, cautioned against excessive optimism, noting the huge burdens on state and local governments, rising costs of health care and other long-run fiscal challenges. “The rise of the stock market is mainly because there are no other good investments in sight, not because the stock market has some unique talent in predicting what’s wrong with the economy.”

N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Mr. Bush, said that “anything that spooks consumers and businesses from spending” could threaten the recovery, including “a worsening of the fiscal crisis in Europe or the increased fear that a similar crisis will soon infect U.S. cities and states.”

The Fed is likely to end its $600 billion bond-buying program in mid-2011, meaning monetary policy might be providing less of a kick to the economy by the end of the year. Officials in the Obama administration also seem to agree that after the $787 billion stimulus last year and the $858 billion tax-cut compromise just approved by Congress, the government’s arsenal of fiscal tools has just about been used up.