Posted on 04/07/2009 9:46:42 PM PDT by Choose Ye This Day
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In the opinion of Kasriel and other more level-headed observers, what’s really needed now, frankly, is for everyone to take a deep breath. This isn’t another Great Depression. There won’t be hobos riding the rails or huge lineups at soup kitchens. In fact, for all the problems facing the economy, some experts are making a cautious case for optimism. There’s a growing feeling that the economy could find its footing far sooner than many are expecting, a result of how dramatic the declines have been as well as the response by central bankers and governments around the world...
...
It helps to recall just how brutal life was for people living through the 1930s. More than a quarter of all U.S. workers lost their jobs back then, while the average wage plunged by 40 per cent. So far during this downturn, unemployment in the U.S. has risen to 8.1 per cent, which means there’s still some way to go before reaching the 10.8 per cent unemployment level seen during the 1982 recession. American wages even eked out a modest gain in February, despite the loss of 651,000 jobs...
Nor are economies experiencing anything like the slowdowns felt in the 1930s. In the first three full years of the Great Depression, America’s economy shrank an astonishing 28 per cent. When America’s GDP fell by 6.2 per cent in the last quarter of 2008, it sparked fears a depression-era contraction was under way. Yet the thing to remember is changes in GDP are expressed at annual rates. The actual decline in the fourth quarter was a far more mild 1.6 per cent, and though the recession began in 2008, the economy actually eked out a 1.1 per cent gain from the year before...
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(Excerpt) Read more at 2.macleans.ca ...
From the Canadian magazine Maclean's.
This guy is a real idiot. We were much better off going into the depression. We were the unrivaled manufacturing leader of the world. We were running surpluses both in exports and in the budget. Our government was much less involved in the economy going into the depression. We were on the gold standard going in, so there was much less they inflation that could be created going in, they devalued the dollar from $20 per ounce to $35, a 75 percent. The idiots we have working now will probably devalue it by several hundred percent. We were a net creditor nation, now we are a net debtor. Our statistics were probably less politically manipulated than they are now. By some measures, Shadow Government Statistics, our unemployment rate is already close to 20 percent. Tent cities comprising middle class people who tried to hold on to their homes for too long have already sprung up in Cali and are starting to spring up in other places including the East Coast but are being suppressed by the MSM. They are clearly reminiscent of Hoovervilles of the depression era. Perhaps they will be called Obamavilles, Polosivilles and Reid Cities. So who are we kidding here? Every move the Bamster and his coterie are taking will only prolong the depression and increase the debt which is why we are in this mess in the first place.
These people are idiots with little or no knowledge of political or economic history. What is coming our way under zero and the donk Congress will at least rival the Great Depression...
I didn’t get into the details. You did, and you nailed it.
This sounds way too much like that old advice to women being raped: “Just lean back and enjoy it.”
Remember that many fortunes were made in the Great Depression, too. How? By playing short then buying cheap. We have more tools now to leverage that action (read an open options market for one). I’m playing DOW 3000 in late Oct. Make your own plays as you see fit, but if you see the train wreck coming, why not make a play?
Now I’m really going to be stocking up on canned goods, buckets of wheat and toilet paper.
Pick your poison: deflation or hyperinflation. We’re probably getting one or the other. (Probably one and then the other.)
This guy has been sniffing some serious glue!!!
IMHO, the GD2 will make the first one look like a walk in the park thanks to the destructive actions taken by our fine government and the fed.
Here’s another thread dealing with the Great Depression, FDR and the New Deal. It is a conservative booklet written in 1938 called “The Revolution Was”. Sadly, it almost word for describes the situation 70 years later.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929392/posts
Some Excerpts:
....Always the single end in view is a transfer of power. Outside of the Communist party and its aurora of radical intellectuals few Americans seemed to know that revolution had become a department of knowledge, with a philosophy and a doctorate of its own, a language, a great body of experimental data, schools of method.....
This revolutionary elite was nothing you could define as a party.....What it represented was a quantity of bitter intellectual radicalism infiltrated from the top downward as a doctorhood of professors, writers, critics, analysts..... There was no plan to begin with. But there was a shibboleth that united them all:
“CAPITALISM IS FINISHED.”
The prestige of the elite was natural for many reasons; but it rested also upon one practical consideration. When the opportunity came a Gracchus would be needed. The elite could produce one [OBAMA]. And that was something the Communist Party could not hope to do.
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