Hey Peter, you paint a pretty grim picture... What do you think of the recent news that UBS says the S&P 500 will rise over 50% by the end of 2009?

Peter Cohen has it right this time around. We are headed into an Abyss or a Black Hole. Into a worldwide economic downturn of Biblical Proportions and it will swallow up one industry and one nation after another. Wage cuts as we see at the airlines and auto industry just make the problem worse...since the less money people have in their pockets...the less they can spend. Lower wages will only serve to speed up the downturn and create more poor people, when what we need to get out of this mess is MORE people with MORE money to spend in their pockets.

A great example of world economies. Att tied together, people take steps to continue the expansion. When all economies are tied together expanding exponetually, when the contraction starts is epic.
Economies should remain regional.
US goods in US consumtion buying only what you can't make yourself.
Instead, we export jobs and buy everything foreign, then wonder why there is no industry or manufacturing to fall back on supporting the faith in our currency.
Once the government is forced to fix the American Auto industry, heavy triffis on auto imports MUST be put in place to pay for the bailout.
Same for electronics, clothing and agricuture imports.
Buy nothing from China for at least ten years. Make the wolrd forgive our loans from then the way we forgave their defaults to us (more than once)

Now that we are past the initial shock and stages of the revelations of the economic melt down, it appears that the most simple way through all of this will be via letting the REGULATED Free Market Economy dictate what happens next.

Yes that will be EXTREMELY painful and difficult for MANY people; but Congress' attempts to remedy these situations has ALWAYS merely worsened the situations, which is what is occurring now.

Once it "bottoms out", people will out of necessity begin to spend and will invest once they know that the markets have settled out. Meanwhile we are just dragging out the process, and the "sharpies" are merely "gaming" the bail out system.

All of this phony optimistic talk about recovery is NOT going to resolve the losses or the bad debts that exists. The economic adjustments are going to have to be made one way or the other. The speccial interests are merely trying to find a way to minimize their losses and to jockey into ways to profit from the recovery efforts. In spite of all of the "lip service", the people in power are ONLY looking out for THEIR BEST INTERESTS.

Even Obama is trying to condition the people about the difficulties that are ahead; and he hasn't even taken office yet.

Those financial corporations that cannot recover on their own, simply need to go into bankruptcy and either be bought by other companies or be dissolved and their assets sold off. The USA must focus on rebuilding its manufacturing base to strengthen our economy.

There is no simple magical way that all of this is going to be resolved.

We allowed companies to become "too big to fail" and in doing so doomed our economy until those that are too big to fail are no longer around.

I'll say it again that these mega corps are actually "To big to be kept alive". Has all of our feeding the hungry in Africa helped the problem. No it has made it worse. By keeping more people alive we have actually made more hungry people. SO much so that African warlords have taken over the continent. They use food like the Mafia used to use alchohol during prohibition.

General Motors needs to fail. Citigroup needed to fail. Out of the wreck the government should use its power to give the pieces to small investors who would make good running streamlined companies. They should force these companies to remain private, never to be publicly traded.

The public company is why we are in this mess. The mutual fund and other stock trades are what propelled the mega corp to "too big to fail" status. These companies became so bloated that there is no way for them to ever generate enough profit to pay wages to the common person that could keep the economy going.

Truthfully we have been in a recession ever since the dotcom collapse. Only the easy access to credit and the insanity of the housing market allowed the economy to grow. It was growth based on fake money.

My biggest fear is that the Realty Association is getting back in the game demanding that mortage rates be pushed lower. This is something that I want but they want it to push prices back up. If that happenns we will just go through this again. Housing is still too expensive, period.

I am sorry that someone took a bath on a 2000 sq ft house in CA that they paid $600k for and now its worth $300k. Nobody looked and said, should a house really be that much?

A lot needs to happen for the economy to right itself. Much of what needs to happen is hard. Like a lot of major companies closing thier doors. The prblem is that after a near half century of building a service economy, is there enough young people that actually know how to build a business left?

When a 20 year old could make a fortune by making a web company with no real business model that gives away a free service with no effort. Sorry but MySpace took no effort and is worthless as a business. Why would a young person want to start a business through hard work and a small chance at success that could take out a lot of people if it folds.

I know what needs to be done. I could bring this whole thing back but I don't think enough people would support it.