When Will It End?

There are a number of new guesstimates as to when this recession might end, and the news is about as gloomy as the gray Monday sky outside.

The Conference Board's gauge of economic indicators fell more than expected during March. The index tracks the expectations for the economy during the next three to six months.

"There's no reason to think that this recession is going to end any time this spring or this summer," Ken Goldstein, an economist at the New York-based Conference Board, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

Meanwhile, in the latest issue of Barron's, Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg crunches his own numbers and concludes that we are currently 44 percent of the way through this current "adjustment period."

Yes, that's less than half.

Rosenberg goes on to say that shrinking payrolls must slow before it's possible to even begin talking about recovery. Until new jobless claims fall to 400,000, he says, "the recession will remain a reality. Rallies will be brief, no matter how violent, and green shoots are a forecast with a very wide error term attached to it." Monthly job losses are currently around 700,000.

by Megan Barnett