There's a continuing, if low level, debate going on here about if and when the economy will recover and pull out of the current recession. Although most of the participants tend to hedge their predictions, the people more optimistic that we will see a recovery of some kind fairly soon tend to scorn the pessimists as "doom-and-gloomers" and those who are more pessimistic tend to dismiss the optimists as "wishful thinkers". A lot of the debate revolves (I think) around whether the fundamentals of the economy are better, about the same, or worse, than in the previous recessions that we compare this one to in all the fancy graphs and charts.
I am interested in seeing what the consensus of feeling here is among both the people that participate in the back-and-forth economic diaries and those who normally skip reading them. So here is a poll that anyone who wants to can vote in.
Disclaimer: I am toward the pessimistic side of the debate, but I hope I have not biased the choices too much because of that. When you get down into the detailed discussions, there is much disagreement about economic "indicators", business cycles, unemployment measures, what GDP signifies, how big our debt is relative to previous eras, etc. In other words, there are many ways to measure economic activity, some of which are the official ones we read about and some of which are unofficial alternates, and there is no unanimity on which ones are valid or relevant to ordinary working people. So it is not surprising that the overall picture is viewed very differently by different diarists and commenters here.
Note: abject apologies to anyone who voted earlier, I had to delete and re-enter the diary because of formatting problems.
Here is the poll.