Holy crap.

[www.exchange-rates.org]

Lets all hold hands and sing Kumbaya....

All kidding aside, even though things will "get better" in a few years, it'll take decades to get over the last 5 years. My poor kids. What have we done.

I'm inspired. No, really!

When Mr. Doom and Gloom says that it's going to take years and Mr. Optimism says that it'll be fine in 10 months, I know that it isn't long until things get better for all the folks struggling out there.

Then we won't push for regulation and we'll find ourselves back here in 10-12 years. Whoooooo!

Latverian Franc would be a great name for an indie rock band.

wait...there's a recession?

@verucalise: I would answer that question, but I doubt it would make me very popular around here.

Let's just say the philosophy that "adjusting your stance on issues based upon new facts makes you a weak leader, rather than a smart one" contributed in great deal to our current crisis.

@audemars: Believe it or not...

I'm in my mid twenties and gainfully employed in a somewhat recession-insulated industry (hospital), so this is the best thing that could have happened to me. I just bought a house, stocks are selling at a steep discount, electronics and home furnishings to fill my new house are cheap as all get out too... but yes, there are many many people suffering right now because of some cowboys in office and on wallstreet... =\

My grandparents' recession: Eat only what you can grow and find 20 million uses for a used steel can.

My recession: Make a pizza from the freezer instead of ordering and cancel HBO.

Just sayin'

God help us if our recession turns into something my grandparents would recognize as tough times.

I'm sure all economic news will suddenly turn positive right around primary season for the next presidential election.

@backbroken: By recession i think they mean, I can't buy fancy cars and huge houses with no money.

The great Debtpression

@verucalise: What have we done.

Who is "we"?

Okay,listen up here people !

Have you ever heard of Joe Granville ?
Robert Precter ?
Ravi Batra ?

I'll save you googling these clowns. They are all economic seers that had their 15 minutes by peddling doom/gloom/apocalypse that fed on then-current market hysteria.It's easy to predict things. We tend to remember th predictions tha are right on the money and forget the wild ass guesses that are pure bullshit .This Roubini chap has been getting a lot of face time on CNBC etc. by hysterically telling us that we're all gonna die and things are just dogshit.
Now. He's right about one thing - We're all gonna die...Sometime.But he's just a little vague about the details. As for penetrating insight , well,anybody can see that things are not as good as they were a couple of seasons ago.The economy is up .The economy is down. But every dip is not an apocalyse. every upturn is not a new paradigm.

Think of these guys as "Financial Astrologers" andnothing else.

@verucalise: it's not like the prosperity of the last few years was real anyways, rather it was built on apocryphal paper gains and even more dubious loans--right? Right?

So taking it back down to earth during their childhood means more growth than they would otherwise have experienced. Right?

@Snarkysnake:

My husband was a big Ravi Batra fan for years. He (husband) is kicking himself now for not selling our house when the values were very high several years ago, banking the cash, and renting while riding out the ensuing recession -- a Batra principle.

@ElizabethD:

"selling our house when the values were very high several years ago, banking the cash, and renting while riding out the ensuing recession -- a Batra principle."

As if the stock market is not hard enough to time ( even though you can buy and sell instantly and know your costs and profit/loss to the penny),this schmuck was trying to get people to time the real estate market. I need a cold beer.

I am sorry but this downturn was not hard to predict. Home values could not go up as high as they were and the %120 loans were a good sign that we were overleveraged. We had too much debt and the downturn will be cured by more saving. That said for those who have saved this has presented some excellent buying opportunities because people are losing their shirts.

@backbroken:
+1

@backbroken: My thoughts exactly. Not to discount the psychic toll of lost jobs. But having to give up cable does not equal depression. Roubini has been yelling doom and gloom for 10 years. He's bound to get it right eventually, given the cyclical nature of the markets.

@cmdrsass: try congressional election. There are a lot of Democrats who will be itching to keep their jobs.

@Snarkysnake: There was some news about a month ago, one of the Russian economists who predicted the recession is now saying that by 2010, Obama will declare martial law and by 2012, the US will break up into six countries and Alaska will revert back to the Russians.

So yeah, get lucky with one WAG and all the sudden the world is full of clowns. Or better put, A broken clock is still correct twice a day.

Things WILL get better. Money abhors a vaccum.

Everyone who has pulled thier money out and sitting on the sidelines, will realize that 1% APR safe saving accounts are losing money.

They will have to invest somewhere: either the market, housing, or business.

Driving up the Market, Real Estate, or unemployment.

@TEW: Saving instead of spending has its own problems that won't exactly help the economy.

@Blinky987: Thats what I'm looking forward too. In 10 - 12 years my wife and I should be completely out of debt (no house / credit card / student loans ) so I can buy a ridiculously large house & car for cheap.

@CreativeLinks:
With deflation the savers will come out ahead. I think you are misunderstanding what people are saying when they say saving. It means that you don't take on massive amounts of debt. You save for the 20 % down payment and then you pay off the mortgage early if you can. The Real Estate mess was caused by too many people buying a house at one time because they could "afford" the large loans.

@humphrmi:

Sure sign that Roubini is a charlatan- he calls people that disagree with him charlatans.

@backbroken: What will your grandchildren's recession look like? Instead of buying dogmeat, eat rats?

It took a long time to get to this point and there's no reason to expect we'll get out quickly.

While a lot of the people who read this site appear not to have been seriously affected, there are many people who lost jobs and are having trouble finding new ones. For them, this slow recovery is going to be pretty painful. Chances are that not many of them were even living way beyond their means but simply living fairly average lives with average debt, but now have majorly reduced income or no income at all. It's not all about people who can't go to restaurants or have to cancel cable.

Didn't Dr Doom and Cramer get into a tiff a couple of weeks ago when Cramer declared a bottom or something ?

I predicted the crash the banking crash in 2001. I predicted that the crash would occur on the back on the housing market which was grossly outpacing the pool of people who could afford to buy the houses even then. and I'm not even a trained economist.
The readjustment is good. Deflation is not all bad. Stuff like that happens when you pretend billions upon billions of dollars that don't actually exist, do exist. Things will deflate, we'll all feel bad, but the people mainly affected will be the rich. We've been artificially propping value of goods for years. It will all be okay. Our children will all be okay. We have the same resources we had before. You will all forget about this, and screw us into the ground again with wishful thinking. It will all be okay.

RICHARDS!!!

@backbroken:
I agree with you. In truth, I know that a lot of companies are laying off and many people are finding themselves unemployed, but... well, despite all the doom-and-glooming going on and all the negative news reports you hear about a souring economy, on the surface nothing seems to have changed at all. I still have money in my pocket, and the local malls are still packed with people spending the money in theirs.

I'm sure the market's in bad shape, but for the most part, you really have to look hard to find any evidence of it in daily life. In other words, compared to times when things really were rough (ie. Great Depression), things aren't bad at all. I'm peachy, at least.

@WraithSama: Perhaps it's all just relative. If we had to go back to the standard of living of the Roaring 20's, we'd think THAT was a depression. Technology (and I don't just mean the co-opted 'electronics' version of the word) has raised the standard of living such that hard times mean we drive our car 2 years longer. The only thing that can really hit us where it hurts would be a prolonged energy crisis (that doesn't mean $4 gas) or a climate catastrophe.

I don't mean to minimize the pain that people are feeling if they lost their jobs or their savings. That pain is real. But there are safety nets that exist today that didn't for previous generations.

Peter Schiff has been doomy longer.

Here's him in a TV interview back in 2002 talking about our "phony borrow and spend economy":

Consumerist spreading more doom and gloom propaganda.

Dr. Doom is named such not because he predicted anything, he is named as such because all Roubini does is constantly predict doom.

Step 1: Predict doom every year. Ignore that you are wrong 99% of the time.
Step 2: Wait for recession.
Step 3: Wait for doom mongering press to act like you have divine prediction powers.

This, by the way, is the same thing Schiff does. In Schiff's case its even worse because hes cost his clients their shirts over the years as he predicted doom during every economic boom.

@Skankingmike: UH... No.. They mean people like my parents (retired, age 59, 61) lost almost 75% of their retirement fund. By the time they realized they needed to get out, it was to late. Thats what they mean by recession.

In relation to what my grandparents went through in the 30's and 40's it is just as devastating to them. Their are people in the same position now as people were in that era, they just don't have computers and broadband internet ;). So before we judge a recession by its peal lets compare the orange to oranges. Not to mention... maybe a bigger and better point, that was a depression not a recession, lets hope we are never able to do the correct comparison.

@TEW: So then I assume you are a multi-millionaire since you shorted blue chips just before this easily predicted downturn got rolling. Nicely done.

@Enkael: You say "during every economic boom" like Schiff's been predicting for decades.

Booms (or "bubbles") do cause trouble when they burst. Also the Federal Reserve has been the leading cause of two recent bubbles, the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble.

Here's an article from 2003 talking about our housing bubble:
[mises.org]

But I guess that's just "doom and gloom propaganda."

@verucalise: Kind of makes me glad I don't have kids. Hell, I'm not even married.

Everything goes away eventually. Of course, when you die all your problems end, too.

The stock market has predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions, and consumerist has articles showing that Cramer's picks are slightly worse than simply flipping a coin.

I agree with Enkael - people are heralded as being correct because when making enough negative predictions at least 1 will come true, and people will forget all the rest.

@Kyle: Tell me about it, I just bought plane tickets and had to pay for them in LVL, it was not as cheap as it could have been.

@MooseOfReason:

Why is it that "personal responsibilty" is the mantra... UNLESS there's a failing business involved?

People who invested in bang/bust dot-coms are responsible for losing their shirts due to lack of investigation... but the dot-coms failed because of the Fed.

People who borrowed more than they could afford deserve to lose their homes... but banks who borrowed more than they could afford and handed out loans to people who they knew couldn't afford them were victims of the EBIL GUBMINT.

The housing bubble didn't burst because home builders built far too many overpriced pieces of crap in areas where people couldn't afford or didn't want to pay for them, it burst because the EBIL GUBMINT didn't work properly!