The prophets of economic gloom have been out in force lately, convinced that the financial-market turmoil of recent months spells serious trouble for the broader economy. With their pipeline to the mainstream media, the gloomsters have largely succeeded in establishing as accepted wisdom the notion that the economy is heading for a big slowdown, if not outright recession.

To some extent, the perspective of these economic naysaysers is a matter of proximity — a number of them are associated with Wall Street investment houses that have taken a beating in the recent market turbulence, so there’s a dark cloud hanging over their world right now. Out beyond the canyons of downtown Manhattan, however, available evidence suggests the economy remains on solid footing and is poised to maintain a healthy pace of growth.

Spurred by the crisis in sub-prime mortgage lending, the credit-market upheaval has primarily involved a re-pricing of risky assets that were priced as if there really was no risk to speak of. Historically, for example, yields on junk bonds have traded near a 5- percentage-point premium relative to safe Treasury bonds. At the height of the no-holds-barred quest for risk a few months ago, that spread had fallen to less than half, at 2.4 percent. A correction for that excessively low price of risk was inevitable at some point, and the sub-prime trouble became the catalyzing event.

But as much as the market has endured some frightful volatility over the past several weeks, the net result has been more of a normalization of the risk premium than an economically damaging risk-aversion blowout. Even during the worst of it a few weeks ago, the Merrill Lynch high-yield bond spread topped out at about 4.8 percent, a level still consistent with a growth-supporting degree of risk preference. It has since dropped back to 4.1 percent, which would not be possible if market participants perceived that a significant economic slowing was in the cards (which would raise default risk).

The conventional wisdom that the pronounced downturn in the housing market would inevitably infect the broader economy appeared to receive some confirmation when the August employment report released early this month showed a loss of 4,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, the first reported decline in four years. But an occasional report of a moderate job loss is not terribly unusual over the course of a long-running economic expansion. In August 1997, during what was generally regarded as a period of unprecedented prosperity and job-market nirvana, a decline of 7,000 payroll jobs was reported. As it turned out, that came in the midst of a quarter with a reported GDP growth rate of better than 5 percent.

If last month’s payroll decline was indicative of strains in the labor market and thus a slowing of economic activity, there’d be some confirmation of this in the weekly reports of initial jobless claims. But jobless claims have held steady for most of the past two years, at a pace slightly above 300,000 per week. That betrays no sign of a slackening job market. These levels, by the way, are on par with the experience of the late-1990s expansion, outside of its latter stages in 1999 and 2000 when boom turned to bubble and weekly claims briefly fell as low as 260,000.

Last week the Federal Reserve, also apparently swayed by the spreading economic pessimism, cut rates by half a point, maintaining that the “tightening of credit conditions has the potential to intensify the housing correction and to restrain economic growth more generally.” However, until last week the real inflation-adjusted federal funds rate was just over 3 percent, a level that has not been seen in advance of a recession since the late 1960s.

For that matter, such a low real rate also has not been associated with the initiation of a Fed easing move since the 1960s. But the central bank made the bet that downside economic risk outweighed whatever potential for higher inflation might result from lower rates. Judging by the response of market-price indicators such as gold, the dollar, and the Treasury yield curve, that may turn out to be a losing bet. The irony here is that the greatest threat of an economic downturn arises from the risk that the Fed will ultimately have to act to subdue the inflationary forces unleashed by its own policy choice.