No one was worried until recently. A girl who does recruiting for [major company here] was informed by memo that there was a hiring freeze on both employees and contractors; so she still has a job but no work. A bunch of my friends are Civil/Mechanical Engineers and they have absolutely no new requests for bids coming in. A small business I know is seeing clients stall for an extra week past net-30 because they are all trying to keep hold of cash as long as possible. Why the hell Bank of America took the fed bailout deal I don't know: I was playing poker with some BoA guys last week and they were ecstatic about all the companies that they had bought on the cheap.

It is not all doom-n-gloom, far from it. While we might be entering into the recession which has been announced time and time again (Paul Krugman has predicted 10 of the last 2 recessions, as the joke goes) it isn't the end of the world. People with solid businesses are still paying on time net-30 and laughing as their competitors hedge. Good businesses even start in a downturn; my last company was started in 2001 because me and a friend saw it as an opportunity (my employer said no new raises and I said I had better things to do).

These are all symptoms of a recession. The cause, in my humble opinion, is the Fed which has been dumping cash into the economy for 20 years. For that reason I think this recession will be deeper or more long lasting than the 2000 one. I can't think of a place left for the phony money to go.