So, this is a Depression, not a Recession?

Economists and politicians alike are afraid to even utter the "R" word, so we wouldn't expect them to use the "D" word at all, even if in the back of their minds they are thinking that this is an awful economic depression.

It looks like that is not the case anymore.

Here is Paul Krugman:

Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.
So will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening? We’ll soon find out.
We weren’t supposed to find ourselves in this situation. For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy.

And, Tyler Cowen:
Eight reasons why we are in a depression

1. We have zombie banks.
2. There is considerable regulatory uncertainty in banking and finance.
3. There is a negative wealth effect from lower home and asset prices.
4. There is a big sectoral shift out of real estate, luxury goods, and debt-financed consumption.
5. Some of the automakers are finally meeting their end, or would meet their end without government aid.
6. Fear and uncertainty are high, in part because they should be high and in part because Bush and Paulson spooked everyone.
7. International factors are strongly negative.
8. There is a decline in aggregate demand, resulting from some mix of 1-7.

I got the link to Cowen from Megan McArdle, who writes:

My reasoning for thinking of this as a depression, rather than a recession: roughly, that we don't understand how to get in or out of it. The recession of the early 1980s was very deep, but we knew pretty much what caused it, and hence how it would end. Even the 1970s slump had an obvious proximate cause in the oil shocks. This kind of perfect financial storm is a rarer bird, and no one has plausibly claimed to have mapped the way out yet.