Three very smart women told me I should identify burning questions for the Today’s economy blog. They said it would help me define the blog’s mandate, and then stick to it. I’ve been lucky enough to know many smart women during my 42 years, and I tend to take their advice.

So here goes:

1. How long will this downturn last?
2. How bad will it get?
3. What can people do?
4. How is the recession changing (or not changing) behaviour?
5. In the long term, how will it impact our attitudes about money?

Jeff Immelt, chief executive officer at General Electric, touched on a couple of these questions back in November. “This economic crisis doesn’t represent a cycle,” he told a Business for Social Responsibility conference. “It represents a reset … It’s an emotional, social, economic reset.”

Immelt’s point is that this is unlike anything we’ve experienced since The Great Depression. Consumers, chastened by a global credit crisis, a decline in the value of their home, mass layoffs and more have taken to heart the idea that they can’t afford to spend the way they used to.

It reminds me of my grandmother, who would stoop to pick up a penny well into her 70s. She couldn’t bring herself to leave it, despite the comforts of my grandfather’s generous Toronto Transit Commission pension plan. Her relationship with money was defined by the 1930s.

Immelt believes ours will be similarly informed by this decade.

We don’t know how long the recession will last, of course. Expert opinion seems to be forming around a recovery that begins to take shape in the second half of 2009 or sometime in 2010. Even that might be optimistic though. On balance, I think the economy will probably shrink in 2009. And growth predictions in 2010 tend toward the low single digits.

“This is the deepest and longest world recession in the postwar era,” said Nigel Gault, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, last week. “The global depth and reach of this downturn makes it much more difficult for any individual country to pull out because there’s such a drag coming from the rest of the world.”

Me? I’m an optimist at heart. But I can be a bit of scaredy cat, too. I’ve got a young family of four, and we depend on my income for all of our expenses. I was raised to pinch pennies, much like my grandmother. And the work I do has taught me a little bit about risk and how to manage it.

All of that is to say I’m treading pretty carefully. I am completely confident that the economy will recover, and yet frankly, Tom Friedman is freaking me out these days.

What do you think?