What do you think, have we seen the "worst" of the recession and now things are improving?

I feel very much that things are getting much better and that the economy is returning to normal.

A relative I talk with feels we are still in a deep dark hole and that there is barely a glimpse of light - maybe.

What do you think about the state of the world's economy?

I work for the index of consumer sentiment which makes up the consumer expectations and consumer sentiment portions of the presidents leading economic indicators - a study ongoing since 1946. Here is the website - click on public access and you dont really need to enter a name or email and in the center of the page under Public Archive if you click where it says here you can see the press reports for each month's results for this year, they are PDF files; the headline for the report at the end of Sept "Recession Ends, but Recovery Will be Hampered by Weak Consumer Finances"
http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/

Thank you so much for linking to that, that is fascinating reading.

I was struck by the phrase "Consumers now put debt reduction and increased savings at the top of their agendas rather than the
quick resumption of postponed spending plans." I think this is a very healthy way for people to be thinking, and I for one applaud it.

i think its a bit early for optimism. all along we've been told that what is happening is comparable to the wall street crash of 1929, and the world economy did not fully recover from that for about 25 years.

the banks are still lining up for tens of billions in government bailouts, and nobody really knows what effect that will have in the long run. i think it would be wise to wait ten years or so before expecting real improvements. politicians telling us we're out of the woods is not the same as real recovery - unfortunately many people do not make that distinction. i suspect that the people who believe things are improving now weren't hit that hard in the first place.

what i do still believe is that the whole credit crisis is a massive con. look at the lloyds group - now owned 70% by the tax payer, although as a joint owner of controlling shareholdership i do not recall being balloted on any of the boards recent decisions, or told how i will receive my dividends in the future. and i don't suppose i ever will. yet it is our billions in tax revenue which will continue to pour into theses financial black holes for some time.

who screwed up? the bankers. who profits? the bankers. who never stops sucking up to the bankers? the government.


'I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.' thomas jefferson.

people have been warning us about banks for centuries. either nobody listened, nobody cared, or nobody believed. the end result is the same, and we are living it.

I imagine part of the problem is that most of us typical taxpayers don't understand how the banks work, so we have no idea when they are doing "wrong" or how to fix them. At least if there's a hurricane that hits a city, we understand the issue and understand basically what's needed to get things fixed up again. With the banks, we can't see what they're doing, and when they start going wrong, we're not sure how to fix them. So it's hard to lobby.

I know it'll take a while for things to really recover totally - but I've heard from a number of my fellow small business owners that things are definitely better now than earlier in the year. We all had *huge* drops in clients and customers, many of us were down to 25% of our previous income and purchase stream. Not down by 25%, down *to* 25%. It was extreme.

The rates over the past few months have increased significantly.

Houses in the UK are beginning to sell again, and self-employed builders, etc, seem to have work, so those are positive signs.

well, i'm a self employed builder and i am working. that has more to do with resourcefulness than the economy. work is always there if you want it. i'm not convinced about the property market picking up as much as is made out, besides which the property market is a tiny fraction of the economy, and not even that representative of what is happening in the financial world.

it is all but impossible to get a mortgage for more than 70% in the uk now, so an entire generation is being priced out of the property market. it will be many years before we see the full effect of that.

I don't see any improvement in the Western US. Maybe the East Coast historically recovers more quickly?

Well here's a chart of the 10 states in the most trouble -

http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/11/news/economy/states_economies/index.htm

California, Arizona and Nevada are on the list!

What's interesting is, looking at the map, the states in the best shape are the "rugged individual" states of North Dakota, South Dakota Wyoming and Utah. New Hampshire is fairly white too. I wonder if that has an impact on how they handle things?

It's interesting to me then that Alaska isn't pure white, I would think they'd do very well living off the land. Maybe they depend too much on oil money or something?