America's Downward Spiral

Between January 2008 and February 2010, employment fell by 8.8 million, the largest decline in American history. The 2008 Recession, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, began with the bursting of an 8 trillion dollar housing bubble. Job losses during the recession meant that family incomes dropped, poverty rose, and people all over the country were suffering. Things like this don’t just happen. Policy changes incorporated with the economy are often a major factor. In this case, all roads lead to one major problem: Deregulation. Deregulation originating from the Carter and Regan Administrations, combined with a decrease in consumer spending, and the subprime mortgage bubble all led up to the major recession of 2008.

The United States has experienced recessions about every twenty years (give or take) since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Nothing that had happened before was quite this serious, chaotic, or as long lasting as the Great Depression.

December of 2007 saw the beginning of the worst economic downturn in memorable history; not since the end of the Great Depression in 1939 has the world seen such a devastating and long-lasting economic breakdown. The Great Recession shook the public’s faith in the capitalist system and silenced those who claimed a modern economy was impervious to another broad collapse like the one in 1929. Discontent and mistrust from the public has built not only with large corporations and the financial sector, but also with the government whose legislature and policies in recent decades seem to coincide with the interests of private corporate power-houses. These lenient policies contributed directly to the recession that affected individuals across the globe. Stunted wages, increased poverty,

In doing this project the literature drawn from is largely non-scholarly for the reason that I am prevailing upon the reader to think outside the box about birth. Most of the “scholarly” research that is available was written by doctors or nurses/nurse midwives who were trained in the medical model of birth. Since part of my premise is that the high rate of Cesarean sections is caused in part by viewing birth as a medical and therefore pathological event, and in part for its emergence as a capitalistic industry, it was then necessary to find literature written by people who have expertise in birthing though not from the traditional obstetrical/medical school approach.

Watts, Bridget N. "Plot Summary My Antonia by Willa Cather." Humanities 360. N.p., 25 Jan. 2010. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. .

This feature begins with a poem by W. B. Yeats entitled, “The Second Coming”. It is a dark poem that aptly applies to the shrinking middle-class, the failing markets, and the increasing arguing of presidential candidates (Foroohar, 2011). Globally, there is a “double-dip” recession occurring (Foroohar, p. 28). Recession is defined as “a period of declining real incomes and rising unemployment” (Mankiw, 2012, p. 423). Certainly this tem applies in the American economy, where jobs are being shipped overseas at an alarming rate. Americans could take comfort in the fact that the economic troubles presently being experienced are also being experienced by other countries worldwide; if that were comforting.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics characterizes a recession as a general slowdown in economic activity, a downturn in the business cycle, and a reduction in the amount of goods and services produced and sold. But what usually causes this slowdown to begin with? Each recession has its own specific causes, but all of them are usually preceded by a period of irrational exuberance which is part of the expansion phase of the business cycle. The most recent one, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, produced the greatest US labor-market meltdown since the Great Depression. This Great Recession began with the bursting of an 8 trillion dollar housing bubble. Irrational exuberance in the housing market led many people to buy houses they couldn’t afford because the thought was that housing prices could only go up. The bubble burst in 2006 as housing prices started to decline, threw many homeowners off guard, who had taken loans with little money down. When the realization set in that they would lose money by selling the house for less than their mortgage, they foreclosed. This triggered an enormous foreclosure rate which caused many banks and hedge funds to panic after realizing the looming huge losses due to the buying of mortgage-backed securities on the secondary market. By August 2007, banks were afraid to lend to one another because they did not want these toxic loans as collateral. This led to the $700 billion bailout, and bankruptcies or government nationalization of Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, IndyMac Bank, and Washington Mutual. Consumer spending experienced sharp cutbacks due to the resulting loss of wealth. The combination of this along with the financial market chaos elicited by the bursting of th...

Considered “The Great Recession,” the time period between December of 2007 and June 2009 was hard for almost every American. Once $8 trillion in housing money was lost, those who once provided for themselves could no longer do so. The U.S. labor market lost 8.4 million jobs (or 6.1% of all payroll employment) in 2008 and 2009. When compared to the recession in 1981, the Economic Policy Institute stated, “Job loss was 3.1%, or only about half as severe.” A year and four months after the recession was supposedly over, the economy was still dealing with 5.4% less jobs than it did before the recession even started.

Recession approached America like an unexpected tornado, leaving many people appalled. Not having any discrimination the citizens of America based on race or gender, leaving many people jobless and suffering the disadvantages it brought. One of the victims was Pamela Brown, single mother of three that was fired from Bank of America, which forced her to leave her apartment that she no longer could affo...

"Shots fired! Shots fired!" is what was heard through the Philadelphia police scanners on the morning of February 11, 2004. Many officers raced to the scene of T.M. Pierce Elementary in North Philadelphia. It was too late, one dead and another wounded. Yes, ten year old Faheem Thomas-Childs dead and the crossing guard wounded in the arm. It was 7:30 am when gunfire exploded through the school yard as parents/guardians took their children to school on what was supposed to be another beautiful school day. This scene and others like it are becoming more often in the US. What do many people see when they look at American society? Does it look satisfying? Or does seeing violence and other dehumanizing acts question what type of society we live in? Violence in mainstream media is the cause of many violent acts and crimes across the Untied States. Ten-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs wasn't murdered by a gun, but by someone who used a gun as the instrument for his criminal act. This little boy was not only killed by a teenager who was trying to attack another teenager but also by the media whose main goal is to use the Second Amendment to the best of their ability.

After the great depression back in the 1930’s, America would think they would never run into an economic scare again, until 80 years later when the next big economic disaster would strike. The 2008 economic collapse would not only be triggered and felt by America, but the entire globe as well. You would think that the United States would have a fail-safe plan on defending off another economic crash, but they didn’t and had shown weakness. The 2008 economic collapse is usually refereed to as the global financial crises or the great recession. With the allegation of collapse from large financial institutions, and the bailout of banks by the government, began the second great depression. Many believe that we are still stuck in this recession and have not completed anything to get out of this situation that’s affecting our nation. I believe that the economic crash in 2008 was the finale building block towards a more structural society, political system, and government in the United States of America.

Every few years, countries experience an economic decline which is commonly referred to as a recession. In recent years the U.S. has been faced with overcoming the most devastating global economic hardships since the Great Depression. This period “a period of declining GDP, accompanied by lower real income and higher unemployment” has been referred to as the Great Recession (McConnell, 2012 p.G-30). This paper will cover the issues which led to the recession, discuss the strategies taken by the Government and Federal Reserve to alleviate the crisis, and look at the future outlook of the U.S. economy. By examining the nation’s economic struggles during this time period (2007-2009), it will conclude that the current macroeconomic situation deals with unemployment, which is a direct result of the recession.

Since being founded, America became a capitalist society. Being a capitalist society obtains luxurious benefits and rather harsh consequences if gone bad. In a capitalist society people must buy products and spend money to keep the economy balanced, but once those people stop spending money, the economy goes off balance and the nation enters a recession. Once a recession drastically takes a downturn, the nation enters what is known as a depression. In 2008 America entered a recession and its consequences were severe enough for some people, such as President Barack Obama, to compare the recent crisis to the world’s darkest economic depression in history, the Great Depression. Although the Great Depression and the Great Recession of 2008 hold similarities and differences between the stock market and government spending, political issues, lifestyle changes, and wealth distribution, the Great Depression proved far more detrimental consequences than the Recession.