For many, the news seems like it can't get any worse, at least from an economic standpoint.
Wall Street spent the first half of the year in free fall, suffering its worse losses since 1970. That triggered a recession.
Unemployment rose to 5.5 percent in May, the fifth consecutive month with a drop in payrolls and the biggest jump in the jobless rate in more than two decades and some experts are saying we're already in the worst recession since World War II.
The culprits - the subprime mortgage crisis, the devalued American dollar and skyrocketing fuel prices - don't look likely to leave the scene anytime soon.
How bad will it get? How long will it last? Few answers exist. But if history holds true, it will get better. And it has been worse.
Here's a short list of the nation's worst economic crises over the past 190 years or so.
Who would have thunk it? Western landowners had a key role in this nation's first panic and ensuing depression, which began in 1819. And war debts, too? You don't say.
Of course, there were other causes that plunged the nation into its first ever depression, but it was expansion of the Western Frontier and American's desire to buy more land than they could afford that caused the slowdown in 1819.
Banks called in loans. People went bankrupt. Washington (D.C., that is) followed up with programs to ease the financial crisis.
Sound familiar?
Sometimes, it's better to leave well enough alone. Or at least it is until things get real bad, as they did in the financial panic of 1837 and the ensuring five year depression.
Once again, massive speculation helped spur economic crisis, but it got a heaping helping hand from president Andrew Jackson and his personal mission to break up what he saw as the unconstitutional national bank.
But when the power when to the state banks, they began printing money like it was going out of style. Jackson tried to curtail the inflationary practice by requiring property buyers to use gold and silver coins instead of the paper money printed by the growing multitude of banks. Instead, the many banks simply called in their wide ranging debts, breaking the nation's banking system in a matter of months.
In New York along, failures were estimated to have aggregated to nearly $100 million. Nearly half of all banks closed.
In response, Jackson's replacement by election - Martin Van Buren - reacted to the financial mess by not doing anything. He did so little that he failed to win re-election and led to the rise to the Whig party, but in economic terms, he took nearly the entire blame for a situation he had nothing or little to do with.
Black Thursday is perhaps the best known disaster day for Wall Street. And Black Monday is still fresh in many investors' minds, having foiled fortunes less than two decades ago.
But the original "black" day was a dismal Friday in September of 1869 in which an effort to corner the gold market by unscrupulous investors and President U.S. Grant's efforts to foil them put the country in a two year tailspin and ensuing depression.
A syndicate of New York bankers had advanced the price of gold far above its value, and Grant responded by dumping $4 million in gold on the market, causing gold prices to plummet. Fortunes were lost. Wall Street was left reeling. The nation's business centers were left paralyzed.
Four years later, another Black Friday would follow when Jay Cooke and Company - the firm that helped finance the Civil War and the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad - would follow.
Both were significant blows to the nation's growth.
There are many who believe that the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression were as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Regardless, it was the most serious economic depression to grip the nation since its founding, and in many ways, it was simply a more exasperated version of the Panic of 1873, where shaky railroad funding led to bank failures and destabilization of the banking system.
Foreign investors had a hand in the mess as well, requesting payment only in gold and weakening the U.S. dollar to levels where it was teetering on the brink of failure.
The failures were massive, with people losing homes, business sectors collapsing and even farm families being sent to the poor house.
The only good thing about the depression of 1893 is that although it was deep, it wasn't long - at least compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
A gold strike in Alaska and the ensuing Klondike gold rush rejuvenated the country's gold supply and its economy, at least until the next economic slowdown.
Many a folks' parents and grandparents can recall the nation's most tumultuous economic period. It began on Black Tuesday in October of 1929 and lasted right up until World War II and post WWII.
Set off by an uneven distribution of wealth and the badly shaken consumer confidence, the Depression (with a capital D) was many families' worst nightmares come true.
Record unemployment. Brutal deflation. Hopelessness run amok.
Unlike the other depressions, the Great Depression expanded beyond the realm of the economic into our very psyche.
And that is why it lives on in our collective memory so vividly.
