I love it how they tell us that this recession is unlike any other in history and then go ahead and tell us exactly how long it will last and just how bad it will be.

Personally I think we've past the inflection point of predictability. Its anybody's guess now.

“We don’t get the job losses stopping until 2010,”

That is the scary part. The way out of a recession is to get people working and spending. So does that mean it is going to last until 2011?

The "mood" after a recession tends to last until about 4-5 years after the recession begins, assuming it's not a total bear market like the 30s or 70s were (in which case, it tends to last at least a decade). People didn't really feel like we were out of the 1979 oil shock and 81/82 recession until 1984. (Some of my earliest memories are from about 1984, and I recall my parents being very careful with money.) They didn't feel like we were out of the 1991 recession until Netscape's IPO in 1995. They didn't feel like we were out of the 2000 tech recession until FaceBook and YouTube hit it big in 2005.

So yeah, if you date this recession from late 2007, we've got until 2011 or 2012 before people really think we're out of it. And that's assuming there's not a further shock, like an oil price spike, another recession (the 1937 recession hit right as people were starting to recover from 1929-1932, the 1979 oil shock hit just as people were recovering from the 73-74 recession), or a war.

I think we all need another top ten list about how to survive a recession when your a startup. Anyone?

At least the dotcom bubble produced world class companies like Amazon and eBay and Google. The housing bubble leaves us with only foreign debt and unproductive granite countertops.

And lots of houses.

I'm guessing some lucky entrepreneur will come up with a good use for all those empty houses, once they've all been foreclosed upon and prices have adjusted to reality.

I had an idea last year that I'd act upon if I had a spare $50M or so lying around: mixed-use coworking/residential spaces for young professionals. The increasing mobility of the professional class means that more and more people aren't tied down to a central office. Why not create intentional communities out of abandoned subdivisions, where young professionals could live and work with other young people? I'd pay a premium for being able to roll out of bed and walk to work, yet I don't like the brick & concrete of dense city neighborhoods. Park a couple ZipCars in the development, and you solve their transportation/shopping needs as well.

I live in an apartment building built in 2006 or so.

The heating system is undersized and uses the same hot water as the shower -- if you want a non-frigid shower, you have to remember to turn the heat off first and turn it back on afterwards.

The doors don't fit quite right. Every single screen in every window is undersized by 2 inches in one dimension. It's also really drafty, which may explain why the original builder is replacing every single window in the 300+-unit complex. (One wonders if a lawsuit happened somewhere in there. Unfortunately, they did not get around to replacing our windows before winter set in, and did I mention that it was drafty? I need to get over to the hardware store to buy plastic wrap for the windows. To think that I dreamed of never having to do that again when we moved out of the 1920s-era house...)

My favorite feature is the built-in wine rack, which adds class to the establishment until you try to fit a wine bottle in it. Which is physically impossible, because it was misinstalled.

But I still feel lucky compared to my sister, who moved into a similar complex in the Midwest where the builder had failed to build the exterior porches with the proper slope, leading rainwater to collect against the walls at the inner edge of the porches, leading to failure of the siding, water leakage, and the exciting possibility of... total porch structural failure. Fortunately, my sister moved out in less than a year.

These little incidents make me worry that a lot of those leftover houses will be slums. They were built terribly, in terribly planned neighborhoods, by people with little past experience and even less future in the construction field. What profit was there in building the houses to last? Nobody was planning to live in them for very long. They're just tokens, built with less care than a poker chip. They were built to flip.

I'm not worried... for every home owner who bought an overpriced home, is another home owner who sold them that home.

Long, Deep Recession? Isn't the proper name for this a Recession?