The US rural areas (agricultural areas) have been in Depression at least since the early 90s.  Thousands of farms have been foreclosed and the acres 'consolidated' into ever bigger operations.  As the population dwindled the local economy evaporated destroying thousands, literally, of communities.   The people who used to work in the feed stores, equipment businesses, banks, schools, & etc also joined the migration to metropolitan areas in search of jobs, boosting the demand for housing while simultaneously increasing the labor force triggering a stagnative affect on wages.

Awash in cash -- Bubbles made sure of that - the financial and real estates sectors made money off of this migration and the natural increase in population of those areas while the other side of the cubicle wall made money by playing games with the mortgages, loans, credit card purchases, & etc.  

It worked for a time, of course.  

What was forgotten was that debt has to be repaid.

The consumer economy IS most of the economy.  When that economy is debt-fueled, at some point, the consumer has to start paying for all the junk they've accumulated and as the velocity of the money going to debt repayment increases the velocity of money going to new purchases must decrease.  (In a stagnate wage environment.)  

I submit this is the Elephant in the Room.

Until the working class receives a wage increase the FED can pump money Top/Down all they want.  This addresses the symptom, not the disease.  For decades the US productive class has been systematically stripped of the wealth we create.  Just as this wealth is not available for the purchase of goods and services in a mass market it is not available for the repayment of debt accrued for those purchases.  

I note, but do not examine, the negative affect of Compound Interest on all of this.

Until Bottom/Up measures are applied to address the actual, as opposed to Top/Down for the crisis-of-the-moment, problems things are only going to get worse.