When and how is our economy going to improve?

Question

everything is f'ed up....gas prices, housing market, food market...when are we gonna get a break and bring things back to normal? is the war in iraq causing all this chaos? when is it expected for things to change (for the better,hopefully)?

Answer 1

If you think this is bad, you haven't been paying attention.

This is nothing compared to the Great Depression,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depre...

or even the economic situation during World War II.

I'd say the economy is still much better than the stagflation days of the 1970s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation

as for oil and gas prices, they are at about the same level (in real money) as the oil shock prices of 1979 and the early 1980s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_cr...

We are not in a 100 year storm by any means.

As for the war in Iraq, it didn't cause this mess, though by insisting on all the tax cuts the Bush administration has increased the U.S. deficit and helped to weaken the dollar, which has contributed to gas and food price increases.

(The dollar has gone from about $1 per Euro in January of 2000 to about $1.50 per Euro today - a drop of about 33% in value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/conver...

)

As for when things will change, the answer is clearly "real soon".

As for when things will change for the better, who knows? China and India are still growing so you can expect commodity prices (food, raw materials of all sorts, petroleum products, etc.) to stay high or to increase. The flooding in part of the U.S., the drought conditions in Australia, etc. haven't helped the food price situation, though if the U.S. government stops subsidizing turning corn into alcohol, that would help.

So, in summary, you had better start changing what you think of as normal.

This just in from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/busine...