What is the actual cause of the current economic depression?

Republicans

Lack of oversight. Greenspan and the Fed were asleep at the switch, and let the tech bubble and housing bubble go unchecked. Worse, they let Wall Street's trolls dictate standards of profit and productivity. They forgot that Wall Street produces NOTHING--these are loonies playing with the money of small investor wannabes, and actually have no investment in the companies whose stock they own. For clowns like you and me, dividends are meaningless pocket change,so why are we messing with the big dogs? The Fed has power to alert the public at the least, and under Dubya it slept.Look at last week's headlines: automakers get a bailout and the market goes down like a brick; 598,000 dogfaces get laid off last month and the Dow jumps 8%. Who da Baby Daddy here? And GM gets megabucks because they're too big to fail?Oh yeah? Chevy just brought out its latest SUV behemoth, the Traverse--23 mpg. highway when empty, but I rode in one and it really is a nice machine. Problem: GM already makes this sucker as the Buick Enclave, Saturn Outlook, and GMC Acadia. And Bush's Republican Guard just handed them a fourth drumstick on their turkey. Why do we need GMC, Mercury, or **** on a boar hog? The Constitution founded this nation on the principle of checks and balances--and with this Fed and the last Congress, the only checks have been in a checkbook, yours and mine. Bring back Paul Volcker and Lee Iacocca.

Just imagine money is also known as "nothing".

One day, there's a group of people trying to make "nothing". They went to the 'market" and trade their "nothing" & made some "nothing" out of their initial small "nothing". Since they are doing well and making lots of "nothing", they began to venture into investments & loans. They lend people "nothing" and invest some of their "nothing" into other businesses too.

Even you don't have "nothing", you can still borrow "nothing" to buy houses. So, the years go by, more and more people start to buy or borrow "nothing" to make more and more "nothing".

At the same time, workers, pensioners, traders, banks, corporations & even governments are investing their money to this "nothing"-making companies coz they are making good "nothing" by investing "nothing" on them.

Then one day, the stock prices of these "nothing'-making companies fall. They tried to recover with their "nothing" that was left. But it was realised that their "nothing" is really worthless. And because there are so many people all over the world has a stake in this 'nothing"-making companies, every one is left with lots of "nothing" .

And when you have "nothing", you can't trade, you can't pay salary, you have to close down the business.

There is no single cause. There are multiple problems that all contributed to the crash.

If you want a single issue to point at, you could say the sub-mortgage sales over the past 10 years was the spark that set of a fire.

When the two biggest government sponsored financial enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) failed due to corruption, bad lending practices, etc... Basically culminated into a spiral of poor financial regulation, and speculation.

Corporate greed and lack of enforcement of laws governing business.

Aliens are abducting everyone and brainwashing them. It's their way of slowly weakening us so that when they invade - it's easier.

One word will explain it.

GREED

were not in a depression.

GREED