You Say Depression, I Say Recession

Currently in the American public eye, the economy is our second biggest problem, falling short to what will happen this season on Desperate Housewives. So what would you call the state of the economy as it is now? Depressed?Or recessed? According to USA Today, one third of American adults believe the economy is in a Depression.
Throughout this article, written by Juliet Lapidos, she tries to evaluate the state of our economy in two words. Comparing and contrasting the two words, one would find that Depression is something more severe than a recession is, and according to former President the late Ronald Regan, "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours, and recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." Her tone while describing this situation is somewhat snide, but in a humorous way, explaining to a seemingly idiotic audience what the real definitions are of these words that have been all to prevalent in street talk everywhere.
Just so everyone knows, a depression is when there is a prolonged loss in GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, or the value of the products of a country in a given period of time.
Recession, is where there is a drop in the GDP over a course of months, visible in numbers in unemployment and overall sales.

This article was geared more towards someone with a little more investment/stockmarket knowledge, as something that would be run in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal, geared towards those skeptics of what to really call this economic crisis currently going on.

This article really cleared things up for me, and most likely a percentage of those who read it. It was thorough and it kind of summed up the market and how America sees our economy at the moment.