Americans, please answer me about the recession...

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We're having it extremely tough here due to the recession in the USA. Since you're in the USA, how long is it being said it'll last?

Experts on economics agree with each other about as often as experts on religion.

I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen.

Not even those who pull the strings?

One to ten years, is what I hear.

I don't believe the ones who say less than a year; there are so many functional changes that need to be made in so many industries and that is going to take time. Much of the stimulus money was on longer term projects that won't really stimulate until a few years from now. And so on.

But none of it will be felt evenly; it all depends on your city, your job, and so on. For some, the effects are delayed. For others, they've hit bottom already.

Even then, I think we can all expect a new "normal." Things here were so very out of control, it was complete unreality. The prosperity we can expect to return to will, hopefully, be at least "real." Which means that most people need to adjust their expectations of what they can and should get out of life.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 28 Mar 2009, 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You referring to the huge banks and insurance companies who bankrupted themselves by betting that the bubble in house prices was going to keep going up forever?

Or maybe our last president, who figured he could "jump start the economy" out of recession by giving every adult three hundred bucks and telling them to go out and buy something?

Or maybe Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan, who said you can't have a collapse in house prices because people still have to live somewhere?

Seems to me that what's going on is so big that it's beyond anybody's ability to pull the strings.

There is much disinformation in the media.

The mainstream press was saying "all is well" for the last 3-5 years. The alternative press talking to the experts the mainstream press were ignoring were saying the roof was about to cave in.

We see now who was telling the truth.

The mainstream press has a vested interest in lying to the masses. If people knew how bad it is (and has yet to become) they would save every dime and not be mass consumers...that would hasten the process we will go through one way or another.

The mainstream press says we can pull out of this in a year. THEY ARE LYING.

There are other major financial bubbles yet to burst. That problem won't be done until around 2011. America is in a depression and it will be much worse than the big one back in the 30s because we are not letting it happen...our efforts to resist it only digs us into a deeper financial hole, and we will only hit bottom harder because of it.

Anyone who will believe me, I tell them that the next generation will be a depression era generation. Until we hit bottom and realize we have to scrap the garbage that got us into this mess, we can't start rebuilding our way out of it.

The current politicos want people to think we can fix a few "minor problems" and keep going forward with the same unsustainable economic practices that created this situation in the first place.

I'm reading attentively, all interesting points of view! I just have nothing to say because Politics and Economy are not my special interests, so I'm almost totally ignorant in those fields.

We're already seeing signs of recovery, it should end this year. Barring another major attack like 9-11-01, we'll be back to normal before 2010. It has only slightly affected my region, and will get worse once GM decides to cut our local plant (which they are talking about doing). But still, my region has barely been affected and everything is pretty good here. There are even plenty of new housing developments under construction here. The company I work for just recently took over our largest competitor, who was failing miserably and went out of business. We took them over and we doubled in size overnight, and are doing just fine.

The recession is only really bad in certain areas of the United States, and the media is doing its part to spread panic where it's really not necessary.

I agree with SBC that we'll see major changes in 2010. I also believe that certain parts of the stimulus package will take time to grow into full fruition. I don't see the problem deepening into a depression at this point, although we've been veering very close to the edge.

Would a freelance real estate loan processor be having an especially hard time now in Los Angeles? I ask because that's my brother, who's scum, and I'd love to know he's having it rough.

IT could be true that this depression could rival the Great Depression, but let us remind ourselves of the Long Depression - which was 3 times longer but half as deep (1871-1897).

Seems to me that what Obama is doing is pretty much what Roosevelt did during the last Great Depression, a charismatic personality giving speeches to inspire hope and confidence and printing money for the government to spend to create a few jobs, nothing on the scale of the jobs lost. The Great Depression went on anyway.

The Second World War ended the Great Depression. Seems a pretty drastic solution.

This time could be a lot worse. Back then, the United States was largely an agricultural nation based on family farms, and a lot of unemployed people went back to the family farm and at least produced some food.

Family farms hardly exist anymore in the United States. Farming is industrial, and 98 percent of the people in the United States have no family farm to go back to and no idea how to grow crops.

The US is also experiencing what they're calling a drought, but tree ring data shows that what's called a drought is actually a return to North America's typical climate. The twentieth century, our standard for what's normal, was actually exceptionally wet.

I'm not at all certain that the worst case scenario will play out, but it seems like a real possibility.

I do not have a clue. But I think the person who said 1-10 yrs. is probably right. We'll most likely take a yr. or more (who knows how long for sure) to recover. Your guess is honestly as good as mine.

Nobody really knows what's going on around here, but I think it is going to be a few years. At least 4 years, I'd say...

We never had a recession. We had an economic bubble associated with several years of serious neglect toward the true health of our economy. Americans everywhere were spending themselves into the hole. Business start-ups were popping up everywhere, but most of them failed miserably, leaving otherwise promising entrepreneurs buried in too much debt to aspire to a more well-planned enterprise. First there was the Dot-Com Bubble (NOT WJ "Bill" Clinton's doing), then we had a demented, self-destructive game of musical chairs as the housing market overheated and finally burnt itself out completely.

There is very little to this recession other than a brief period of panic following the final collapse of the self-destructive illusion spun by the GOP. We are already starting to bounce back, even though the economy is due to shed several more jobs over the next few months. Thankfully, our economy HAS made bonafide gains thanks to information technology and other boons over the past generation. It is highly unlikely that that the recession will deepen, and our economy should grow steadily over the next several years. However, what will NOT do is snort more of the bubble-economy cocaine peddled by the GOP and their libertarian counterparts. The worst will be over soon, and our economy should grow rapidly but, more importantly, with a greater sense of balance.

Henry Cabot Lodge was the US ambassador to South Vietnam in the early sixties.

Back then he said, "Anybody who thinks they know what's going on here doesn't understand the situation."