I knew the US economy was bad, but I didn't think it was THIS bad. I think numbers 3 and 4 in combination with 7 are pretty scary.. It means its only going to get worse. What does everyone else think?

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You may want to look up what actually happens when a bank "loans" money.

While I agree that the economy is in the crapper this article is not unbiased. They use large numbers to make you think things are worse than they are.

Example, #37, 1.4 million is a substantial number of people to fail in 1 year and yes it is 30% higher than 2 years ago, but that 30% does not mean 30% of Americans failed it is 30% of the total that failed in 2008 added to that number. Still that is a lot of people until you consider the population of the U.S. is 300,000,000+.
Bankruptcy is the definition of financial failure, that's a financial failure rate of less than 1/2 of 1%. Tell me any where in the Universe a success rate of 99.5% isn't acceptable.
Then figure how many of those bankruptcies where caused by the recession. Failure in business is quite common and not alarming, most successful entrepreneurs fail a couple of times before they succeed and then you have the plain unprepared new business that tank normally. But yelling "bankruptcy is up 30% to 1.4 million cases" in a crowded theater will scare the hell out of people.

#45 is an other example of using inflated numbers to add weight. Debt is 360% of GDP. OMFG!!!! its the end of the American way. PSSH please. Joe average makes $40k a year, nice middle class people their house cost 100k, nice small place, starter home. $100k financed over 30 years at 6.5% (guessing) adds up to about $140K in interest. Thats $240k in debt and a GDP of $40k. Wow Joe is screwed, right? No, and here is why, Gross Domestic Product is the total of our labor over the period of 1 tax year. Divide Joe's housing debt by 30 years and it comes out to $8000 per year. Or 20% of his GDP. Some where I read that the average American spends 30% of their annual income on housing, so Joe is doing well. If our debt owed in this tax year was 360% of GDP we would have already collapsed into anarchy.

This whole article is full of the same crap, fear mongering for a noble cause is still fear mongering.

Deregulation of the Banking industry by the Republicans is the main cause for the banking failure, add some ignorant (bordering on criminally inept) government policy and oversight and the whole thing came unhinged.
It takes some crap like this every now and then to get our collective heads out our collective asses. The bright side of this is that even though we are in a slump we are America, and we are still the same creative innovators we have always been. Every time we hit a slump we over come it and history shows the worse the slump the bigger the boom that follows. Even now in what that article claims are our darkest days we are still living lives, spending our money, and plodding on as usual.

The writer talks about how they have sent all the jobs over seas, being from Detroit and old enough to remember the 70s I know what it meant when they shipped those jobs out of the country. It hurt the the Great Lake States badly, they took these jobs away from highly skilled labor who demanded to be paid for their skills and sent them to the 3rd world where unskilled labor could be had for pennies on the dollar. You get what you pay for, now the top car brands in this country are Japanese. Lesson learned.

But Detroit is still there, Cleveland and Pittsburgh are still there. The skilled labor is still there and need jobs. Michigan is still sitting on top of some of the largest deposits in the world of copper, iron, and salt and is still surrounded by huge lakes perfect for cheap, bulk shipping. Every thing that made this region the king of production 30 years ago is still there

The real way to view this is to weigh this economic mess against our potential. We are still a nation full of people who create, invent, solve, and over come. Skilled labor and resources are the foundations of wealth, we are the richest Nation on earth in both of those commodities.

The biggest thing standing in our way is a Government that can get nothing done because of bipartisan gridlock that is the result of fear mongering and greed.