An update on this week's improvement in the stock market and what President Obama's feelings toward it are. Plus, how big is our federal budget deficit?

Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) announced that it expect its investors to earn $0.55 per share for the quarter while analysts had forecast earnings of just $0.24 per share. Quarter earnings came out earlier than expected, leading to a 15.5% increase in the financial sector. This company, which primarily focuses on banking services, expects to report a record $3 billion in earnings for its first quarter. This finally helped the Dow move back above 8,000 and induced each index to rise more than 3% higher.

After seeing the stock market improve this week, Pres. Obama says he is quite optimistic about the direction of the economic recovery. He told reporters after a meeting with economic and regulatory teams plus Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke that there are "glimmers of hope across the economy," adding that there is still "a lot of work to do."

Still, the Obama administrations short- and medium- term goals have not been completed. These plans include stronger regulation on the finance sector, a more stable growth for the world as a whole, and answers to the questions of what to do with health care, energy, housing, infrastructure, etc.

Pres. Obama's fear is that lawmakers will ignore some of the advised measures and borrow more money from the government as a solution instead, further increasing the federal budget deficit.

What exactly are some figures for the budget deficit of our government? On Friday, the Treasury Department reported that the deficit is at $956.80 billion for the first half of the 2009 fiscal year. Compare this to $312.75 billion in the first six months of fiscal 2008 and $454.80 billion in all of fiscal 2008. The budget deficit in fiscal 2009 is predicted to be the highest since World War II.

What exactly is contributing to our deficit? First of all, gross spending through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), consisting of spending on government bailouts of the financial and auto industries. This comes out to be $2.89 billion for March and $293.27 billion for the year to date. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac contributed $15.2 billion and $30.8 billion respectively to the deficit.