These days it's easy to get overwhelmed by the constant analysis of how our economy is faring. To break things down we're going back to school for a lesson in the ABC's of the financial recovery process.

In this doom and gloom economy, we all need a little pick-me-up and nothing spells comfort quite like alphabet soup. But if you look too closely at the sea of swimming letters, economic trends start to resurface.

Right now economists are talking about that much anticipated recovery in terms of letters. The first shape you'll hear about is the V.
To see what that means, we're going back to school, Rockford College to be exact.

"When we go into a recession, output and unemployment drop, so things get worse, high unemployment, lower output. So the economy sort of declines like that," explains Evans, as we maps out the shape on a chalk board. "What we hope would be the case would be tax cuts, government stimulus programs sort of boost things back up and we would have a very quick recovery. That's called a v-shaped recession."

But Evans says at this point the v-shape is unlikely, because we're well into this recession, without much recovery, yet we seem to be at or near the bottom. What's more likely is a u-shape.

Evans says, "The economy would dip and dip into a recession, but that we would stay sort of on the bottom for a long period of time and that it would take a while to come out."

A still more depressing shape is the L. "That just means things stop getting worse, but they don't get better for a long time," says Evans.

One last option we chalk up to the letter w. "People do things that help boost us out of a recession, but then they get anxious, they get worried and they start acting defensively and we go back down into another drop of the letter."

The trickiest part of this lesson is we won't know which shape we're in until the turning point, when the economy finally pulls out of the soup.

Evans says the u-shape is the most likely option because many of the programs in the economic stimulus package may take some time to work. That would lead to a slower recovery. Of course we don't know if the rebound will climb back to the same heights as before the recession.

Evans adds another key factor is that even as the federal government is spending at a record rate to stimulate the economy, state and local governments are cutting back, since they have to pass balanced budgets. That's clearly visible here in Illinois, where Governor Pat Quinn is proposing deep cuts to fill a roughly 11 billion dollar deficit.