Roubini: 20 reasons why we're not consuming

Nouriel Roubini's list explains why this recession is going to be very long and very deep. Shorter Dr. Doom: we're broke, we can't get credit, we're in hock up to our eyeballs, and we have no confidence things are going to get better anytime soon.

Meanwhile, financial columnist John Cassidy is unwilling to believe economists, who missed the severity of this thing months ago (Roubini, remember, is an honorable exception), when they say now that this downturn is going to end sometime in 2009. Excerpt:

Economists regard the Great Depression as something akin to the Black Death: a fascinating and terrifying historical aberration that, thankfully, can never happen again. Despite a stock market collapse and the demise of several huge financial institutions, this reassuring view of the Depression remains intact. On October 10, Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and a senior economic adviser to Barack Obama, said that "barring egregious errors, this is not going to be anything like the pictures people saw of the 1930s." A few days later, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the U.S. economy will "emerge from this period with renewed vigor."

Among noneconomists, there is much more concern about what lies ahead. In October, a CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe another 1930s-style depression is very or somewhat likely. Dismissing feel-good suggestions that the turmoil on Wall Street won't have much impact on the rest of the economy, 55 percent of the respondents said the financial crisis would affect them personally within the next year. A separate poll for Condé Nast Portfolio shows that people working in the finance business are even gloomier: 77 percent of them say their industry is in a state of crisis, and 50 percent say the economy is the worst it has been in their careers.

So who are we to believe: the experts who failed to predict the current crisis or the great American public? With due respect to my fellow dabblers in the dismal science, I share Joe the Plumber's queasy feeling. Unless something miraculous happens in the next few weeks, the new inhabitant of the Oval Office will inherit an economy flailing under the weight of record debts and rising unemployment. If a depression is defined as a deep, extended recession of a severity that nobody under the age of 75 can recall, then it is quite likely that we are already in one.

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