How to do shrugs with dumbbells: mhlo.co On Barack Obama's 50th birthday, he — and the rest of America — got a pretty terrible present: the worst stock plunge since the 2008 market crash. On Thursday August 3rd, The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 4.3 percent during the day, and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost 4.8 percent, as investors dumped risky assets and clambered for safety. A week's worth of declines in the stock market erupted into an outright plunge as a stream of bad news kept coming: The American economy is barely growing; the federal government is preparing to slash spending; and a growing crisis in Europe increasingly threatens to send shock waves through the system. Experts say investors have factored in a terrifying risk -- that the economy might begin to contract. "The realization is dawning on the world that the future of the United States is bleak, that what we have been seeing is what we got. It's not going to really get much better," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics. So what do you think? Is America headed into a Great Depression, or can we pull the economic plane up from this current tailspin? Leave a comment below and let us know. www.huffingtonpost.com money.cnn.com www.foxnews.com