In respect to raynod's comment, it's funny to see how view points change due to distance, culture, image, etc. And yes, the economy still $ucks. There were a few (minority) of economists telling that we may have a double dip, frankly, that is a possibility considering most Americans don't even know basic financial literacy skill. For example, in my AP Gov't class last year, there was a 1 week unit on the "Economy". The people in this class couldn't even calculate compound interest!!!! Not to mention they had no clue about minimum payments, The Fed,etc. Don't get me wrong, these are some smart people (as in class average GPA was ~ 3.5/4.0) but they still fail at these things. People didn't even know about a CD (and seriously... one kid though CD as in Compact Disk) or stocks/bonds for that matter. It was funny seeing how 70% of the class didn't know that inflation has been increasing so far. I'm not saying that I knew everything, for example,I didn't know about the FICO score and a few other stuff, but I knew more than others in the class. This could be due to the demographics of the class/school ( mostly upper class, and upper middle class; basically, 25-40% of the people drove "luxury" cars. The lowest car any one drove were Honda Civic from at least 2003). The schools got a pretty bad rep due to the VT shooting as 2 or 3 of the people involved went to this school. The school does quite well academically imo (class average for my class of 2010 was IIRC 3.3/4.0). But that's not important.....
Anyways, I believe no one can understand exactly how the economy works. Economics is NOT a science. There are no fundamental laws like in mathematics in economics.
PS: JD,badge,et al, who did you guys vote for?