If you listen to the financial reports these days, the consensus seems to be that we will enter a short and mild recession.  However, there are various factors present in today's economy that may not allow us to pass this recession so easily as in the past.  We are seeing just about every day reports of major corporations cutting jobs.  It is no secret that unemployment is up and job losses are continuing.  What makes this recession more dangerous is that the people losing their jobs have no equity in their houses they can use to pay bills...nor do they have cash saved in emergency funds.  Why do I expect this recession to be longer and more severe than past recessions?

There is little home equity to help the middle class workers who lose their jobs

I don't see any new innovations or demographic changes to help drive productivity and consumption...in fact, we see the opposite.  Demographic changes are pointing to less productivity.

Our credit is tapped out...we have no borrowing poser left in our houses or credit cards.  Consumers can't borrow any more.  Plus, interest rates are already low...we can't go much lower if the economy continues to worsen. 

The weak dollar make it more difficult for the US to borrow.  The credit of the US is weaker with the weak dollar.

The entire country is already carrying too much leverage.  Leverage is great when times are good, but it makes bad times even more difficult.

The only human resource this country can look to  for  productivity is foreign workers...provided our federal government can figure out how accept enough foreign workers to meet demand.  And the problem here is that the well-educated baby-boomers are retiring and being backfilled by lower-skilled foreign workers.

Prices are continuing to increase.  We haven't seen much CPI data to support this yet, but food and energy price increases will force other price increases.  There is a lag between the time energy prices increase and the time manufacturers of other products will increase prices to cover these costs.

Our country's wealth is held by too few people.  We are depending on the wealthiest 10% of the  population to increase spending and consumption to carry us out of this recession.  However, when spending increases, these same people are just becoming more wealthy, adding even more strain to the middle and lower classes.

US companies are no longer the dominant companies.  We are losing out to foreign competitors.  The best-run companies come out of downturns as stronger companies.  These will be foreign competitors.