Will the recession become a depression?

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Some say this down turn will go for a double dip, and become a full blown depression, perhaps worse than the one in the 20s...

possibility, or scare mongering?

The decision to go austerity will inevitably cause a double-dip, yes. Austerity throughout the west will have dangerous consequences. If only the people responsible can have the blame stick to them. Well, in Milan the Communist candidate won the mayor's race against Berlusconi's party so there's some good news.

Scare mongering. The last person I heard use the word 'depression' was Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party. Believing, as he does that the BNP are only one crisis from power, it's in his interest to talk that crisis into being. Likewise others who thrive on conflict.

Our real challenges are not the current recession, but what is coming - an aging population, an oversized state, peak oil and climate change. Challenges we are quite capable of rising to.

Its likely. Especially if the US defaults on its debt or gets its credit rating lowered.

The condition of the U.S. economy is not so much depression as stagnation. This reminds me of the U.S. economy under administration of Jimmy Carter. We stewed until R.W.R. came along (for better or worse). Jimmy managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

ruveyn

I can't help hoping that it does.

It already feels like it in Michigan.

I'm looking at moving out of here to Indiana or Wisconsin.

A Long Recession. We had one after the Civil War, having killed everyone, there was twenty years of declining markets, and free land.

Housing and employment are unanswerable problems that will continue.

Government at all levels will have to layoff more people. We have always been two tier economically, now the old middle class is being demoted to the underclass.

It is a result of computers being better than people, and people not developing their skills. Finish high school and go to work on the GM line was good enough for generations to rise to middle class. Jobs have been declining for thirty years, people did nothing.

So far the worst has been hidden by unemployment, it will end. Food Stamps will not keep up the house payments, There is another step down coming, for some.

One advantage of having the house collapse is that if you survive, you can build it better and right, from scratch.

ruveyn

I dont know for sure but I heard that they printed and dumped a whole bunch of new money into the economy which is going to cause a problem and maybe it will deepen the recession into a mild depression....however in the US, there is a downward trend, our country reached it's height and its all down hill from here. There are alot of signs that the US is in decline, so the depression to end all finacial woes is comming, maybe not this time around, but at some point, I believe, in the next 50 years. There are alot of people in power who really are working agianst our best interest...on both sides of the party line, for short term gain.

Peak oil will hit the US harder than Europe, because the US has been dependent on cheap fuel for so long. The new money doesn't help in the long run - one advantage of gold over currency is that the government can't just print more of it. Some parts of the US are in decline as manufacturing has gone offshore, but by European standards the US is huge and you can hardly compare California and say Michigan.

Stay away from Florida. With Gov. Scott making a bad situation worse, we might as well level this place until it's all swamp again.

How does printing money cause depression? I don't get that. So much money is being destroyed by deleveraging and most of the so-called printed money is being used to purchase foreign assets. It's a deflationary climate out there.

It is the drying up of credit that causes deflations and depressions.

ruveyn

The drying up of credit more than makes up for any money printing. The rise of hard money populism is another example of suicidal movements taking shape.

That's funny. Oil supply and production is much higher than the price of oil futures would suggest. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15715744/ns ... udy-shows/

The reason why the price of oil and gasoline as so high is that speculators have very easy access to cheap loans to corner the market on oil and gasoline futures. If the US government would mandate that the futures market traders cannot borrow more than 25-50% of their futures portfolio value, oil prices will come down sharply.