There’s a new buzzword making the rounds on financial cable shows, Web sites and blogs.  It’s “The New Normal,” a phrase that’s supposed to reflect the changed economic landscape following last year’s epic meltdown.

Here’s the basic argument.  First, you have a crisis that deep-sixes house prices and saddles financial institutions with mountains of smelly, indigestible mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives.  The result is a recession that’s both wide and deep.

Second, you have huge job losses, with official unemployment levels approaching 10% (and probably higher if you add in those who have stopped looking).

Third, employment woes cause consumers to zip their wallets shut, causing tumbleweeds to roll through retail establishments, restaurants and auto dealerships.

This results in a kind of stalemate with consumers not buying because they don’t have jobs and employers not hiring because they don’t have sales.

Thus, according to this line of analysis, even though the global economy has pulled itself out of recession, it doesn’t have the strength to get back on its feet and resume growing.

So “The New Normal” is a state of tepid growth for a prolonged period where neither producers nor distributors nor consumers are able to provide the kick to move things along more quickly.

(Even China, although it’s the fastest-growing large economy in the world, can’t get its growth back into double digits because its export-dependent economy is languishing due to a lack of appetite for its goods in the developed West.)

As with all economic predictions, all I can say is: “Maybe so.”  It may be that we’re in for an agonizing period of glacial growth, and that “The New Normal” will indeed be an economic landscape dominated by dead flowers and dried-up lawns.

But I doubt it.

I don’t know where the impetus for the next economic surge will come from or how long it will take to arrive.

It’s just that every time (EVERY TIME!) I’ve heard market commentators say “things are different this time,” they have been wrong.  In the late 1990s, it wasn’t true that the Nasdaq was going to rise forever; three years ago it wasn’t true that housing prices could rise forever.  And I don’t think it’s true that things are that different now.  That’s likely what the booming global stock markets are predicting!

There is a very large amount of capital in the world, and it’s looking for a way to grow.  Just because we don’t see how it will happen doesn’t mean it won’t.  If I had to put money on it–and, in a way, I do–I would bet that within a year, economies will escape from the doldrums the commentators fear.

It won’t make any difference to the way I pick stocks anyway.  I’ll still be looking for fast-growing companies with high rates of revenue and earnings growth, attractive market propositions and strong charts.