I really don't mean to piddle on your parade. Really I don't. I'd like a recovery sooner than later, a sharp rather than stagnation.

For all that, I'd recommend this: think very hard about the couplings between the US and China. Think very hard about what China will do as their economy's GDP growth declines to, oh, 5% or less. And then think about whether they're going to continue to buy US sovereign paper, or pour their cash reserves into a domestic stimulus plan.

When you think all of these couplings through (and I still am), the picture gets much less clear, and the probability of a rapid recovery sinks like a stone.

Farmers are in better shape that most everyone. You produce tangible products (ie, not words on paper) that are needed and necessary to the world at large. You have a job that not only do most people not want, most people would have no clue how to do. Farmers in the US have a banking system that is largely segregated from the cluster-(*&^ that is the consumer/corporate/bank lending centers.

The rest of the US economy, however, ain't gonna recover anytime soon. The analysts who are now projecting 2009 recoveries were recently saying "one quarter and done" a year ago. Many of these same people were saying "there is no housing bubble." On and on. The truth is, they don't know, their models are now non-functional and have no predictive skill. Most all of the econometric models out there have been built, tested and back-tested on post-WWII data - ie, they've never had to deal with a debt deflation. They've had to deal with recessions, but this is no ordinary recession. All the economists who actually lived through the Depression (ie, the last debt deflation) are dead. All the economists today view such things as an academic exercise, a quaint wrinkle in history that we just simply cannot replicate today because we're oh-so-very-much smarter than we were back then. And those old farts in the 30's didn't have PC's on their desks to run models and crunch numbers. They had to use slide rules, for cryin' out loud!

Well, here's the other thing that none of these oh-so-very-smart people are predicting: a full blown depression; ie, unemployment rates over 10% for four or more quarters, or negative GDP growth for quarter after quarter after quarter. There is no official definition of "depression," so they'll argue, spin and prevaricate on whether we're in such a condition, and refuse to predict such things.

The reason why I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic is that I see policy makers repeating (willfully) some of the same mistakes of the 30's all over again. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.