We're likely headed for a second dip in the pool. The bulk of the severity will be felt outside the cities since all the rural jobs are essentially gone and the bulk of the marketplace out there is based on a combo of credit and real estate (also credit.) Obviously, the cities will take a ride too, but I think fair pretty well just due to the amount of sheer wealth concentrated there and the very real ties to global growth.

The only way the rural US survives in the long term is a very real civil works program along the lines of The New Deal. As long as Obama gets into office, I believe we can look forward to that. It may be an economy in the US that's essentially flat for a decade, but people will be able to live their lives in relative calm.

Most people here didn't really notice when Japan basically had a depressed economy for roughly a decade starting in the 90s. Their reality didn't implode because they had the proper civil programs to keep civil society.

Regards, I'm not seeing the great depression part 2, and certainly not on a global level, but a reckoning for rural america for living on credit for too long. We could go through the news archives and find more or less the same articles once a decade.

One outside scenario is that the bubble that exists in the oil market will pop after the summer run-up, relieving energy costs, and giving the economy a lift as a whole.