Pop economics

The news is full of stories about a receding US economy. I don't know much about these things, but I did know this was coming, and here's how:

In the first semester of my second year I took my favourite course of the program, Urban Development. I hadn't expected to like this class because I wasn't interested in development, but it was really interesting and the instructor was great - really funny, full of personality. He wore a suit and tie to class every day because he worked for a market research company and he had this thinning head of hair so there was nothing unusual-looking about him, but he had this quirkiness that reminded me a little of Joe and Gran. He would be talking about a chart, for example, and if it happened to be round he would say something like, I love this chart because it's shaped like a pizza and pizza is my favourite food. He'd say it in this really excited way. Then he'd smile there for a second, as though imagining eating the chart. He talked an awful lot, but I was always interested in what he had to say (unlike the rest of the class, who all thought he was dull, which just astounded me) because he would get so into whatever it was he was talking about. He was endearingly peculiar.The weirdest thing about him, I thought, was that he drank at least one, if not two, bottles of diet Dr Pepper every single class. I don't think I'd ever seen anyone drink diet Dr Pepper before, let alone repeatedly.

One class, he went off on one of his many tangents and predicted a US recession was right around the corner due to all the lending that was going on for mortgages to people who really couldn't afford them. And lo, a recession is upon us, and whenever I hear something about it, I see a bottle of diet Dr Pepper.