Not trying to be a Debbie Downer at this time, just making sure that no one is caught by surprise.
We can be upset and bitter about invocations, benedictions, inaugurations, and pastorbate till we are blue in the face. The fact is that for millions of Americans, their only hope will be sworn in on January 20, 2008. They are holding on by a very thin thread, and if we don't succeed, we are truly fucked.
The big boys ain't all saying over and over again, this is "the Worse Financial Disaster since the great Depression" for nothing!
The Bottom will fall out of the economy on Day 2 of the New Year!
After the Holiday season, the pink slips will be sent out....something that has been held off till after the New Year celebrations. I hope most are prepared and have done what they could to become Depression proof. For those who are, you are lucky if you escape. For some of us who have already been hit hard, we need to fasten our seatbelts. For the millions who don't have the luxury of escape and own no belts, this will be serious.
I mean to wish all a happy holiday, and will pray that what I am saying will not come to pass, but I think that it will. Anytime economists on both sides of the theories are swallowing whole the hook of a $850 Billion to a 1 Trillion Stimulus package, that ain't a good sign.
Reviving this economy is gonna take some real heavyweights to do some heavy lifting.
OVER THE PAST few months, Americans have been hearing the word "depression" with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression of our own.
It's a frightening possibility, but also in many ways an abstraction. The country has gone so long without a depression that it's hard to know what it would be like to live through one.
Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals.
Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that's not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that.
What, then, would we see instead? And how would we even know a depression had started? It's not a topic that professional observers of the economy study much. And there's no single answer, because there's no one way a depression might unfold. But it's nonetheless an important question to consider - there's no way to make informed decisions about the present without understanding, in some detail, the worst-case scenario about the future.
5 more pages here--->
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/depression_2009_what_would_it_look_like/