Worse Than the Great Depression?

Washington's Blog has a long post on the current economic downturn, cross-posted at Naked Capitalism.  You often hear that it's the worst since the great depression.  It may well be the worst ever.

I'm not going get into extensive quotes.  You can go to the source, and you should for all the information, quotes, links  and eye popping charts.  I see Suzan has picked up the whole post, as well..

But I do want to embed the two videos.  The first shows a lot of non-agreement among CNBC financial talking-head types, from this morning's live action on the market floor.  BTW, the DJI finished the day at 12,290.14 down 279.65.





The second is an excerpt from a recent 60 minutes episode that shows that things are so much worse than you might realize.





There's lots more at the link.  Read it and weep.

I will quote the wrap up at the end.

Two fundamental causes of the Great Depression, and of our current economic problems, are fraud and inequality:

• Fraud was one of the main causes of the Depression, but nothing has been done to rein in fraud today

• Inequality was another major cause of downturns - including the Depression - but inequality is currently worse than during the Depression

There are, of course, other reasons the economy is still stuck in a ditch for most Americans, such as encouraging too much leverage, bailing out the big speculators, failing to break up the mammoth banks, and failing to spend wisely, where it will do some good. See this and this. But fraud and inequality were core causes of the Depression, and our failure to address them will only prolong our misery.

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