Like the in-laws or that old friend from high school, the economic downturn has been an unwelcome guest in all of our homes for some time now. And I’m starting to wonder if part of the issue isn’t our own timidity.

I was talking to a mortgage banker friend of mine here in Jacksonville recently who put this thought into perspective for me. For instance, she showed me an excerpt from an article in Time magazine:

“But the US economy remains almost comatose…. Unemployment is still high; real wages are declining…. The slump already ranks as the longest period of sustained weakness since the Great Depression.

That was the last time the economy struggled under as many “structural” burdens, as opposed to the familiar “cyclical” problems…. The structural faults … represent once-in-a-lifetime dislocations that will take years to work out. Among them: the job drought; the debt hangover; … the banking collapse; the real estate depression; the health care cost explosion and the runaway federal deficit.”

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