The results are in, and economists agree that the recession-like levels of economic activity seen in the first quarter were an aberration, a one-off, a fluke.

Nothing to see here, folks — better times are ahead.

Hey, that’s probably true — or at least as true as it’s ever been throughout this five-year recovery. For the most part, more people are better off now than they were last year, or two or three or four years ago. But let’s not kid ourselves. They’re hardly thriving.

Wages are stagnant and too many people are still out of work (9.8 million at last count). More than a third of the unemployed haven’t had a job for more than six months. Sure, the unemployment rate is lower, but that’s more a function of people dropping out of the workforce than any increase in hiring. (And much of the hiring we do see is of the low-wage, no-benefit type.) Yes, weekly jobless claims are at cyclical lows, but they’ve stopped coming down. Indeed, they’re stuck.

Plenty of other data points to a perkier second half of the year — consumer confidence, new vehicle sales, manufacturing surveys — but, then again, we’ve heard this all before. Every year, it seems the narrative is all about the coming second-half rebound, but then the big bounce never comes.

The problem isn’t that the economy isn’t recovering. The problem is that it’s recovering too slowly for us to see the progress. It’s like watching a glacier flow downstream.

And that’s why, for all the criticism of central banks’ easy-money policies, it is still too soon to think about normalizing interest rates.

As the last half-decade proves once again, the economy and the stock market are not the same thing. They are happy to chart divergent courses. Stocks blasted out of the bear-market bottom of 2009 regardless of persistent economic sluggishness both in the U.S. and abroad, but only because the world’s central banks made credit all but free.

The real economy, lacking a corresponding policy of fiscal stimulus, was left to fend for itself — with predictable results. You can’t have growth without demand, and you can’t have demand without  job growth and higher wages. That’s why the specter of rate hikes is such bad news. It’s not just that slowing the flow of cheap credit has to automatically hurt asset prices — it’s that the real economy is still not ready to do its part.

That the economy sucked in the first quarter is old news. It has no bearing on anything now.

But it does serve as a stark reminder that the recovery is so tepid — and so subject to shocks — that the economy can’t be counted on to support a huge chunk of people who buy things and pay taxes. Just look at a year-to-date stock chart for Wal-Mart (WMT) or the dollar stores.

There is a reason that defensive sectors like utilities are leading the market. There is a reason that Treasury yields are dropping even as the Federal Reserve is pulling back on its bond-buying program and signaling rate hikes in the not-too-distant future. The economies of the U.S., Europe and Asia are nowhere near ready to do the necessary lifting once the free money dries up. The Q1 GDP revision should serve as a reminder that all other projections could very well be too rosy.

As always, true long-term investors have nothing to fear. Just keep dollar-cost averaging in and ignore whatever may come.

But for anyone more tactically minded? Just cyclically, this bull market is getting old. A combination of economic sluggishness and countervailing monetary policy is bad juju.

Time to shade toward defensive names and sectors — and maybe tighten up those stop-losses, too.

As of this writing, Dan Burrows did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.