In my understanding, it's not just the current president who is to blame for the recession; instead, it is the monetary policy on which we've placed our bets for the past few decades. Interest rates have been manipulated (then by Greenspan (a member of Ayn Rand's "inner circle" by the way, who later (as chair of the Fed) went very much against her ideas), now by Bernanke) to the point that currency begins to mean less and less, particularly since it can be printed at will by the federal government, much to the economy's detriment. We have no solid backing for our currency, and we artificially prop up prices with subsidies & fight inflation by manipulating interest rates.

Add to this that we go to war whenever the president says so (which is anti-constitutional), borrowing the money for that from China or elsewhere. We go to the war allegedly in the name of "spreading democracy," but in order to spread democracy, we borrow money from one non-democracy (China) and give it to another (Pakistan) only later to find that we did not get the return on our (borrowed) investment we had hoped.

Never mind that these wars we have gone to are fought against people who were in our pocket just a few short years ago. In previous decades, Saddam Hussein was a "friend" to America (even while gassing the people of Kurdistan with weapons he bought from us), and Bin Laden was a "freedom fighter" in Afghanistan whom we supported covertly in the hopes of breaking the Soviets at the time.

Iran was overthrown by a CIA coup in 1953, for which certain Iranians have never forgiven us. The 1979 revolution was backlash from that particular bit of intrigue, and no amount of strident Country songs by Charlie Daniels can change the fact that our relationship with that country could have been different all along.

I've gone off point, but to me that is inevitable in a topic of this nature. All of these things are tied together, and to pull at one string of this problem is to reveal the nature of those ties. You can't fix economic policy and ignore foreign policy, or vice-versa.

It was inevitable that the housing market (hosing market) would become problematic. It was not being run on free-market principles.

It was inevitable that we would run into these foreign policy problems. We were not thinking in terms of what the founders intended: Stay out of the internal affairs of other countries.

So . . . with an artificial market starting to tank, and with massive expenditures climbing all around the world because of our foreign entanglements, we are reaping what we have sown: a recession, which could go a long way toward worsening before it gets better.

On the plus side, Donald Trump says now is a great time to invest in Real Estate, and it will get better in about six months. (That is to say, if you have that kinda cash so you can buy up stuff from those poor suckers who lost their shirts, you're in for big profits.)

Herring405