From an article by Peter Goodman at the top of the home page of the NYT:
The fortunes of the American economy have grown so alarming and the pace of the decline so swift that economists are now straining to describe where events are headed, dusting off a word that has not been invoked since the 1940s: depression.
-- snip --
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, now places the odds of "a mild depression" at 25 percent, up from 15 percent three months ago. In that view, the unemployment rate would reach 10.5 percent by the end of 2011 — up from 7.6 percent at the end of January — average home prices would fall 20 percent on top of the 27 percent they have plunged already, and losses in the financial system would more than triple, to $3.7 trillion.
Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics, sees a 20 percent chance of "a depressionlike possibility," up from 15 percent a week ago.
"In the housing market, the financial system and the stock market, we’re already there," Mr. Sinai said. "It is a depression."
The larger point of the article is that the Obama administration's stimulus proposals are probably not enough to meet the needs of what appears to be an approaching economic near-apocolypse.
[Alan D. Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore] noted that the weakening economy was destroying demand for goods and services even faster than the $787 billion stimulus program could replace it.
In response to that, let me just say: we on the left have been telling you people this for months. It is nice to see you starting to get over your Atlas Shrugged adolescent hangovers. As for the truly right-wing opinion-leaders and politicians, they will cling to those fantasies until the United States is a smoking ruin, and then blame the blast crater on ACORN, or something. They are not reality testing well, and must be ignored.
Funny how in a crisis everyone sane starts doing what they should have been doing all along. It's a shame it takes a crisis to get them there. In any event, I hope the use of the D -word in the NYT wakes some people up. Indulging in ideological fantasies about the purity of the free market and the evils of helping people socialism is only going to ruin more lives, now. That's all it is going to do.