Something is stirring in corporate America.

Heading into 2012, years of nervous uncertainty about the fate of the world's largest economy has been replaced with a slightly different form of nervous uncertainty.

"We're probably not moving into a double-dip recession," said Brian Derksen, deputy CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, the global advisory firm.

"The general economic indicators are not outstanding, but they are trending right," he told AFP.

That may not sound much like an improvement, but compared to the doom-hued pallet used to paint the Great Recession years, it is luminescent.

To be sure, there are still many question marks about the health of the US economy.

The housing market is deep in the doldrums with no obvious quick exit and unemployment remains eye-wateringly high.

The Federal Reserve has few tools left to stimulate the economy and Congress cannot even seem agree what the economy is or whether stimulus is needed.

Elections will likely paralyze Washington until 2013, when budget tightening is expected to deepen growth-cutting budget reductions, spreading pain further to hard-up state authorities.

Yet many businesses appear to be increasingly optimistic about the state of the US economy.

A November poll by the National Federation of Independent Business reported more optimism, with its optimism index rising for the third month in a row.

"After so many months of pessimism, November's modest gain made it feel like spring, again," said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg.

The Fed this week acknowledged that the economy had improved -- nodding to a drop in the unemployment to 8.6 percent -- although it did so in the most downbeat way imaginable.

"While indicators point to some improvement in overall labor market conditions, the unemployment rate remains elevated," the Fed's top policy makers reported.

Most economists predict moderate, if not stellar growth for the year ahead.

"We do expect the US economy to expand about two percent-plus in 2012, with small gains in many sectors, there is no double dip but there is not an boom," said Wells Fargo chief economist John Silvia.

According to Deloitte's Derksen "we feel better about things today than we did a year ago."

But after a year which saw external economic shocks from Arab Spring and Japan's earthquake and tsunami, the world again seems to be conspiring to throw up more hurdles.

"In the background there is a big black cloud that wasn't there last year," said Derksen, adding that the results of Europe's crisis are already being felt.

After two years in which Deloitte has been adding US staff by around eight percent every a year, Europe's debt crisis is already influencing business decisions.

"We are slowing our hiring a little bit, because we are worried that if something goes off the tracks we're still bringing in people but the business is disappearing," he said.

Europe's crisis may yet drive down US exports and shift the earth beneath the still too-big-to fail US financial sector -- a game changer for the US recovery.

According to Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius, the European crisis is likely to shave one percentage point of US growth in 2012.

In a sign of how important the financial implications could be, Hatzius estimates a 25 percent drop in Europe bank's lending to US customers could alone cut 0.4 percentage points off US growth.

All that means the fate of the US recovery is further from Americans' control. But at least the problem is becoming less home-grown.