US Financial crisis: is it recession or depression?

[psy604]

currently american companies like MS, HP, ... buying back their shares at very low prices (i've read in financial newspaper recently).

"This is what happened: Some "financial engineers" with PhD.s from Harvard etc. outsmarted everyone else, when they came up with a scheme to make a lot of money for themselves. They sold a lot of bad morgages to people, like illegal aliens with no work permit, who could never pay their mortgages off, and they packaged the bad mortgages in with the good mortgages, and paid the only 3 lame U.S. rating agencies to put a "Triple A rating" on these bad loans. They then sold these bad "Triple A loans" to other banks and financial institutions, where these bad loans exploded over the last 2 yrs. These banks and financial institutions lost so much money on these bad loans, which they had purchased as good triple A loans, that they went bankrupt. They were insured by AIG, which consequently also went bankrupt. Sounds like a Terrorist Plot? It was only the plot of homegrown greed! And Cox was asleep and instrumental. Well, the U.S. Government had no choice than to bail out AIG, by lending them about 84 billion dollars for 11.75% interest for 2 yrs to let them sell off their many companies in an orderly fashion, to prevent a global crisis. Friedberg, the founder of AIG, lost 6 Billion Dollars in one day."