While President Bush said he was optimistic about the country’s economic future, many economists are making comparisons to the period prior to the Great Depression.

Martin Hennecke, of the Tyche Group: “What investors need to understand, it’s not just about subprime and mortgages, it’s really a big crisis of debt on all levels, even government debt hitting the West now, and that’s very significant. In our view, it’s just getting started, and it will really develop into a very, very severe recession, maybe a real depression of the style we saw in 1929.”