"Recession to end in 2009"...

[Bigmack]

I've heard that sooo many times lately. Guys who should know saying that the economy will turn up in the second or third quarter of 2009.

I don't see what would cause that to happen. Another huge wave of foreclosures, housing going nowhere, etc...

Am I reading too much LATOC?

Please... can anybody tell me what is coming down the line that will bring this economy out of the toilet?

[Taverner]

1. Well, putting on my "optimism" hat...

One could argue that the credit and housing issues will finally flatten out, and that in itself is enough to give the economy a small boost.

Accountants love predictability. More so than unexpected gains. Give them predictability, and they feel safer investing.

[DJ13]

2. Technically, they're right. It will end

.....and the depression begins.

[fed_up_mother]

22. My thoughts exactly - recession ends, and depression begins :(

[Phred42]

3. They NEVER give out the REAL figures this early in the process

2009 is a lie of course. Kind of a reverse Carrot and stick

If it did turn around THAT fast we'd all have whiplash

[robinlynne]

4. Obama, but I don't believe it will take 6 months! It will take years!

I would like to say someone is going to take back all the stolen billions from the past 8 years and use that money to end poverty, homelessness and create green energy, but i do not see that happening. That would speed things up. there are 3 trillion missing from the Pentagon alone. add halliburton. exxon tax cuts, millionaire/billionaire tax cuts, you could fix the economy quickly.....

[ananda]

5. Actually, that's right.

That's because the economy will completely implode
into something far worse than a recession.

[Donnachaidh]

6. the 2009 DEPRESSION n/t

[louis-t]

7. RW is saying this. If it doesn't happen

they can blame Obama. If it does happen they will credit stupidface. It's win-win for RW.

[Citizen Number 9]

13. No one is going to credit "stupidface" for anything

except the worst administration in history.

Years from now you might have the woefully uninformed blogging somewhere and claiming that since the economy turned around in 2009, the seeds must have been sown in the last Bush Administration, but that would simply be...well...ignorant. You see a lot of that kind of thing about past administrations right now.

[FrenchieCat]

8. "They" couldn't foresee the recent downfall, so I"m not sure why they think

they can NOW foresee the END of the downfall?

Who do "they" think they are kidding? :shrug:

[Idealism]

9. Ok people seriously lets get real

No one knows shit about anything here, when consumer spending will start to at least level (instead of dropping like a rock), when job layoffs will slow to less than 500,000 lost per month, or when home prices will flatline. So you can't even THINK the 'recession will end on this date' because we don't have a previous model to look for, this kind of economic contraction hasn't happened since the 1930s and guess what: we didn't keep too terribly detailed records back then.

[madrchsod]

10. probably 4th quarter of 2009

then there will a steady improvement in 2010.

a lot depends on the auto restructuring,public works projects,and serious rules and regulations in the banking industry....

[unlawflcombatnt]

19. How would any of that turn the economy around???

"a lot depends on the auto restructuring,public works projects,and serious rules and regulations in the banking industry...."

This still doesn't provide any long-term prospects for growth. Demand for everything is down, so how will "restructuring" the auto industry turn anything around? What kind of restructuring compensates for a loss of GM auto sales from 17 million/year to 11 million/year.

The only way to turn anything around is to put Tariffs on manufactured imports, thus making US-produced goods price competitive with cheap imports (especially from China.) Increasing the demand for American production is the only way to bring us out of this. If we can't increase actual spending power of American workers with falling real wages, then we can re-direct more of that spending power toward US produced goods, at the expense of foreign-produced goods.

[Speck Tater]

11. This is the leading edge of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

If you want a clue on when the American economy will fully recover, remember that the economy of the Roman Empire didn't recover until ... oh, wait, it never did recover.

Obviously nobody knows for sure, but that's my uninformed amateur opinion, and I'm sticking with it.

[notesdev]

12. Yeah, right

and monkeys will fly out of my butt this Christmas.

[northernlights]

14. "they" have been saying that for a year or so now...

Housing recovery has been "just around the corner" and just one or two quarters away since, oh, when did the downturn start again?

"They" are either ignoring or oblivious to the next looming crisis...massive scale credit card defaults, maybe in line with layoffs?

[Citizen Number 9]

15. If you're teetering on the edge of a big economic disaster

(like we are), it is just irresponsible to make predictions of doom and gloom, especially if your opinions carry some weight. Attitude plays a big part in determining what actually happens.

I can't fault them too badly for making rosy predictions about 2009. Ultimately, it is up to each person to determine how they are going to act given the entire body of information that they have before them. If you are the kind of person who seeks out and examines all types of opinions, then you are better informed. If you only like to hear a certain thing, you can be nearly certain your decision making will suffer.

I have found that the predictors of doom and gloom are most often the ones who wish their pronouncements had more impact than they actually do.

This economy hasn't hit bottom in all ways yet, particularly if you are thinking about job losses. The only thing that has a chance of helping is a $500 billion commitment by the new administration to creating jobs. A somewhat better chance would be given by a $2.5 trillion commitment, but even then, I'm not sure we can drag the rest of the world out of recession by sheer force. They would have to be willing to make appropriate commitments as well.

[marketcrazy1]

16. it is

mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for this recession to end in 2009 we will not even reach the bottom until early 2010 and by then we will be in a depression,, this kind of comment is just spin for the public good. personally I think it is detrimental as people will not prepare as early as they should so that when reality sets in it will be mutch more harsh!!. DO NOT RELY ON THE MEDIA TO KEEP YOU INFORMED, they may have our best interests at heart but in the long run they will end up doing more harm than they know!!

[SlowDownFast]

27. Wish I could rec this post.

Mathematically impossible is correct.

Also, I very explicitly remember every shill on CNBC saying "Buy!Buy!Buy!" and "Bottoms In!" THIS WHOLE LAST YEAR (while I was getting OUT last December). Remember, this was just going to be a "mild recession".

Don't believe the hype.

edit: and it's not "spin for the public good". It's DISINFO to keep you in the market while all the big players are GETTING OUT leaving J6P holding the bag of shit.

[antimatter98]

31. Two recent events: Enron and the move to the Sunbelt and demise northern manufacturing.

Enron hyped itself to employees, then froze their right to get at their
investments/401k's before Enron went down, and until the end, Ken Lay
was positive about the company---employees said they believed him. (shades
of Madoff)

Everyone in Michigan and parts of Ohio knows that it did not take 'a month' for
the loss of jobs in these states to reach a tipping point, but instead it was
a prolonged migration to the Sunbelt, and a slow decline for these states.
(Even in Pennsylvania and parts of upstate NY, it was like this---communities
barely hanging on to their companies, trying all sorts of development tricks
and tax breaks to induce businesses to stay, over a period of decades...but slowly
losing jobs to the South)

Then all this started again, or continued, with outsourcing overseas.

Today, what happened to the Northern tier of industrial states is happening
to the entire country, and it will be a prolonged decline. Unless you think that
if McDonalds stock goes up its good for our economy, the larger issue is
where are good paying jobs, with benefits, and where has our ability to make things
or grow things gone?

Both the UK and the US have sent millions of jobs overseas, as their governments
worshiped globalization, gone into massive debt, and the UK is asking: what
happened?

Our country's ability to make things, to have a + savings rate, has been replaced
by the financial industry using usury credit and behind the scenes credit default
swaps to generate virtual profits from: the lives of ordinary Americans.

Americans are on the menu, and will continue to be unless major changes take place,
which are unlikely since Congress no longer represents us, but does represent
corporate interests and financial interests---which are anti-American worker, which
happens to be 'us.'

[westerebus]

17. A rabbi, a priest, and a flying monkey..

go in for a car loan....When I hear this as a joke sometime in the future, I will know my uninformed opinion was another delusion caused by sun spots.

[Warpy]

18. Some of those guys are paid to happy talk the suckers

and nobody who is paying the slightest bit of attention believes the next year will bring anything but a world of suck.

There is too much bad paper resetting, meaning the disaster of this year will be repeated and amplified through the first of 2010. This is the perfect storm of greed, deregulation, thievery and idiocy, the colossal clusterfuck of our time, and it's not going to turn around that quickly.

Mid 2010, if everything is done correctly, will be the earliest we can expect any stability at all. I honestly don't expect it then.

The wealth of this country, its industrial infrastructure, has been largely exported. Until and unless we rebuild that infrastructure, we'll continue to slide into serfdom and irrelevance.

[Phred42]

20. BS - it won't be over for years - here's why....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x50901

[Danascot]

21. Krugman says it could be a decade

Paul Krugman, winner of this year’s Nobel economics prize, said on Monday that the world could face a Japan-style, decade-long slump.

U.S. economist Krugman again called on policy makers to spend liberally to cushion a withering global downturn.

“A scenario I fear is that we’ll see, for the whole world, an equivalent of Japan’s lost decade, the 1990s — that we’ll see a world of zero interest rates, deflation, no sign of recovery, and it will just go on for a very extended period,” he told a news conference.

“And that’s unfortunately very easy to see happen.”

Krugman added that in his worst case scenario there would also be a series of extremely serious crises “in particular countries that are in big trouble.”

He said there were already premonitions of economic and political crises in line with those in Argentina and Indonesia in the 1990s-early 2000s, particularly “in the European periphery.”

Iceland and Latvia are among European countries that have been hit hard by the global financial crisis.

“We can easily be talking about a world economy that is depressed until 2011 and maybe beyond,” Krugman said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE4B75KJ20081208

[sarcasmo]

24. From what I see here in Michigan, I have to agree with Krugman.

[regnaD kciN]

30. Actually, Krugman was saying something quite different as of 12/22...

...in the NYT:

Whatever the new administration does, we’re in for months, perhaps even a year, of economic hell. After that, things should get better, as President Obama’s stimulus plan — O.K., I’m told that the politically correct term is now "economic recovery plan" — begins to gain traction. Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010.

Krugman's concern, as of now, is that, once we've pulled out of the dive, there will be strong pressure on Obama to return to "business as usual" free-market economics, and believes that would only bring about a second, 1937-style recession. He holds that any stimulus plan really needs to be for the long term.

[sarcasmo]

23. That is when the Depression begins. I don't see things getting better any time soon.

[SlowDownFast]

28. Yep. If you're not preparing

you're denying the math and logic of what's happening and where we are most likely headed.

[regnaD kciN]

29. If we get a Depression next year, after Obama takes office...

...you can kiss goodbye the hopes of any future Democrat holding power for the next forty years. :-(

[roamer65]

25. We won't see postive GDP numbers until late 2010 or 2011.

...and those will only come off massive quantitative easing and massive public works spending.

[JackRiddler]

26. In the propaganda there are only two allowable states for the economy

1) "It's not a recession yet."

2) "The recovery is underway."