This post is part of our feature on Money Losers of 2008. See all 20.

For a second year in a row, American homeowners are among the biggest losers of 2008. In 2007, predictions were that American homeowners would lose over $103 billion. Now at the end of 2008 the number jumped to losses of $2 trillion as the value of homes continue to fall with no end in sight. As job losses increase, even more families will be forced into foreclosure.

Homeowners who bought at the top of the housing bubble between 2005 and 2006, could wait decades for the prices to reach that level again. People who must move for a new job or family crisis find they either have to come up with cash for closing (if they find a willing buyer) or they must walk away from the loan and give the house back to the bank either through foreclosure or through a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

The housing bubble that started to inflate in 2002 and burst in 2007 drove housing prices way out of the normal range. The normal ranges for housing prices track these measures:

• Income: The house price should not exceed three times your average household income, which was true from 1950 to 2000. In 2006 the average household income was $66,600, so the average home price should have been about $200,000. But during that year the average home price was about $300,000.

These days, investors have to search far and wide to find positive data points, let alone a positive outlook, for the U.S. and global economies.

And, without question, the financial crisis and slowing global growth, combined with previously weak economic fundamentals in the U.S., are indeed formidable obstacles to any investor's hope for optimism.

Still, perhaps the real the danger lies in not where we are but in denying where we can be, and that's where John Maynard Keynes comes in.

For those unfamiliar, Keynes, along with Milton Friedman and Karl Marx, are the three major philosophers of modern economics.

In the United States, policy markers since 1981 have favored market absolutism, Friedman's view, peppered by government intervention, Keynes' view, when needed.

More recently, during the current decade, market absolutists appeared to have had free rein. Some of these market absolutists are now arguing that 'the market should run its course' and 'recessions, even deep recessions, are an essential part of the business cycle,' etc. Don't believe any of it for a moment, Keynes would say.

Expansion is the normal condition

It was part of the genius of Keynes that he revealed to us that the natural state of the economy is expansion and that a downturn is "extraordinary imbecility." Further, Keynes also reminds us that recessions, or economic downturns, are not necessarily self-correcting.

Keynes also believed that the market economy, in the form of mixed capitalism, could survive only if it earned the support of the public by raising living standards.