Ben Bernanke predicted earlier this week that the recession will end by the end of 2009 and that recovery will be made in 2010, while other experts like The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Farrell expect that the recession will last until 2011.
I am no economics expert, but thinking practically, the likeliness of the recession ending before the year wraps up is slim. The stimulus package that Obama signed on February 17th is almost 650 pages long — there’s a lot to digest.
One component of the bill that was in focus was the creation of jobs through investing in infrastructure, education, energy, and technology. This takes a great deal of planning — from urban planning to financial planning — and thus a significant amount of time.
Then, the government must go through the process of hiring, after which they must train new employers. Again, this takes time. Once people are on a payroll, the economy may be on track to recovery.
However, this does not necessarily mean that consumers will begin spending as soon as they get their paychecks. They would first have to pay off their debts and bills. Keeping these practicalities in mind, the likelihood of seeing the economy revive in the next 9 months seems low.
1 Comments until now.
Yeah. The scariest thing about this whole mess is that nobody seems to really know how it ends or what might happen. Which leaves room in the mind to imagine the worst, which isn’t exactly comforting. I wish that some economics expert could stand up and say how these kind of economic troubles have happened before, we’ve been through them, and it doesn’t mean the end of America’s economic dominance and prosperity. Then I realize that the reason nobody is doing that is because we haven’t really seen anything like this before. We’re in uncharted territory, completely. That’s daunting.
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