There are a three elements to economic recovery: people must need to buy things, they must have the money to buy them, and they must be believe that that the future is worth investing in. Every economic downturn leads to people postponing purchases of new cars, new homes, and new consumer goods. After a while, we expect people to be compelled to catch up with purchases; the old car cannot be fixed and must be replaced, and so forth. What’s remarkable about the current poor economy is how little of the automatic bounce back we’ve seen. We look to the factors of money and confidence to explain the lack of recovery.