To Escape a Depression you need good news; bad psychology can only be overcome with good news, but that's in scarce supply.

"We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are out of the woods, because we're not. We're still staring into the big black hole."

NVDL: Interestingly there is a technical set of semantics to describe a recession. For a depression there is no definition other than a broad sense of a really really bad recession. So many people are using the vagueness of the definition to try to avoid describing it as such which I find somewhat foolhardy. Why, because only once you have looked reality - the cold, hard, dark extent of it - full in the face, can you begin to know what to do and prepare accordingly. Until you do that, you're setting yourself up for a lot of pain and disappointment. Which is what we're doing...

clipped from biz.yahoo.com Call it whatever you like-recession or depression-the current economic state has investors concerned that a worst-case scenario is in the offing. Many think the word "depression" is, in fact, incidental to the real state of affairs. Things are bad, really bad, and everybody knows it. "The closest thing we can find to the market collapse that we are experiencing now would really be '73-'74," says Peter J. Tanous, president and director of Lynx Investment Advisory in Washington, D.C. "The market went down over the two-year period 45 percent. I was already in the business 10 years in '73, and I can tell you this is far, far worse." But unlike recession, there's really no technical definition for depression. So if it is a depression, bad psychology can only be overcome with good news, and that's been in scarce supply.