Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, there are really three. One, economists call the classical approach, which simply says that government should not try to end the recession. Government should keep its hands off. The economy will self correct. The economy will eliminate the excesses that cause a recession. Crises will adjust, and when all that happens, the economy will come roaring back. The second approach would be called the Keynesian approach. This was actually developed as an alternative to the classical view. It was developed during the 1930s, during the Great Depression. It says, look, the economy won't self correct, or if it does, it's going to take a very long time, and lots of people will be put out of work, so you need to have the government come in and intervene. You need to have government stimulus programs. You need have the Federal Reserve printing money, etc. And then the third approach would be what I would call the monetarist approach, which says that to keep the economy running smoothly, you have to have a stable monetary policy. This is a broader approach in a sense that it argues that perhaps one of the reasons we get into recessions is that the Federal Reserve tries to stimulate the economy with a lot of money. That stimulates the economy. Then it tries to pull the economy back. That causes the economy to go into recession, and so the monetarists say, focus on the money supply, keep it growing at a constant, even level."