The prolific Judge Richard Posner has recently written a book called A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression, and he is now blogging about it in order to provide updates on the ongoing economic crisis which continues apace. Here is the link.

Even for "non-economists" his post today is not filled with too much economic jargon such that it could be easily understood by the average lawyer. An excerpt follows about one of the reasons he thinks we are in a depression instead of merely a recession:

… it is the unprecedented scope and cost of the government’s recovery measures [about $12.8 trillion so far] that mark the current economic crisis as a depression, and no mere recession; for the costs and hence gravity of an economic crisis include not only the loss of output and employment during the acute phase of the crisis but also the costs incurred in trying to put the economy on the road to recovery….