#3 Meet Your Banker. - By Fred McKinney

The current economic crisis started as a financial crisis and has spread to impact the general economy. The unemployment rate reached 6.5 percent last month, the highest rate in 14 years. While I have been saying for the past year that the economy is in recession, the arbiters who make the official determination, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), have not made such a pronouncement yet. But there is little doubt with the employment report released this past Friday, that we are indeed in a recession.