If you have allowed yourself over the past three months to get caught up in the political debate over socialism versus capitalism and the relentless sniping from the right over the national economic solutions proposed by the left, you are probably still full of fear and some justifiable anger. And you might be feeling rather hopeless.

Amid that hopelessness you may not have noticed that the first quarter of 2009 was truly unique. This volatile quarter began with a bear market decline of 20%+ between January and early March, and it ended in late March with a bull market rise of 20%+. You just don’t see that every day.

Our take on the late-quarter upward swing is simple: We believe that when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was hitting 6,500 to post a 25% drop since the beginning of the year it became a point of maximum investor fear, when some of the most patient among us began to run for the exits.

But before those departing investors could even begin to lick their financial wounds, the Dow posted a 21% surge in 18 days in late March to put the index back over 8,000. Investors with cash on the sidelines, and there still is a lot of that idle cash around, had been waiting for signs of capitulation, and when they saw it they moved in to capture what they believed were bargains strewn amid the wreckage of an over-sold stock market.

We believe it’s important to note this possible turnaround, if for no other reason than to foster some much-needed hope. It’s been 18 months since the markets peaked in October 2007, and the cycle was bound to rotate upward someday. We hope it’s now.

So are we out of the woods yet? Not hardly. The late-March upswing could be just a feint, a bear market rally expected by many. Perhaps, and maybe the markets will continue to test the bottom for some time, bouncing along in an unproductive trading range that tests our patience as well. But we tend to believe the worst is behind us, that the markets have begun their own recovery as a precursor to the eventual end, maybe this year or even next year, of the global recession that plagues all of us.

Remember, the markets historically recover well before the end of a recession. We are hoping we saw the beginning of that recovery in March.