Those with an investment position betting on the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting to say 6,500 (it's at 8,131 now), should read Alexander Cockburn's piece in CounterPunch and be happy. Not the rest of us.

Consider the recovery project facing Obama in saving the world economy and the words gargantuan and humongous come to mind, analogous to constructing a snow fortress on thin ice on a central Wisconsin lake during the early Autumn. [Lots of unknowns and ambiguity; we don't know what to do, why and whether it will work.]

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by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire blogger

The gurus at the National Bureau of Economic Research have finally acknowledged the obvious: the U.S. economy is in a recession, and has been since December 2007. With Wall Street still on life support and unemployment statistics reaching levels unseen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the news was far from shocking, as Truthdig's Ear to the Ground notes, but still enough to help push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 700 points on Monday.

More frightening than the belated use of the r-word-- Kevin Drum of Mother Jones called the December start-date all the way back in February in a piece for the Washington Monthly-- is the fact that drastic government action to right the nation's faltering economic ship does not appear to be working. The current crisis has delivered a blow not just to investors and homeowners, but to the work of economist Milton Friedman, a thinker regarded with an almost sacred status in conservative circles. Over at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard highlights a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman on how Friedman's monetarist economic theory has taken a hit over the past year. Friedman's doctrine calls for restricting government relief in times of economic strain to the arena of monetary policy--that is, central banks should increase the supply of money in the economy, but governments should not directly undertake spending initiatives to boost demand.

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