A Depression Compendium

While it's not hard to come up with similarities between current conditions and the downturn that began 80 years ago, it helps when you can look at a variety of data from that long-ago period. In a 29-page report, "A Distant Mirror: Credit contraction, monetary policy and commodity prices during the Great Depression," Reuters columnist John Kemp provides us with an interesting statistical compendium. (Hat tip to Paul Kedrosky.)

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Finance & Investing Business & Legal investing great depression

Comments

[H. Spencer]

The corporations are just making it worse, and driving things on and on and on. Layemoffs are the key reasons. Are the corps cutting to survive, or to not lose a penny in profits? I think the latter is true. Does anyone not think these big folks would hesitate to cut the throat of any human being to keep their profit margins at current levels or higher? Would you say woe is me for the billionaires who run these places that are in the news giving layemoffs?
NO WAY. Its just that they dare not lose a "inthdegree" of that holy bottom line profits. It is the big corps who caused this, and the cure is working stiff aka Mr Highly R. Expendable.

Nuttin new Been this way forever Always will be Ask Mr Expendable in a few days, weeks or months.

[xqqme]

What people learn from history is that people don't learn from history.

[Bruce H]

Mr. Spencer puts it succinctly. The wealthy and/or powerful elites (corporate titans, regulators, legislators, the law/lawyers/judiciary etc. etc.) are all now discredited. Corporations, for some odd mercantilist reason, are given the legal status of a person in perpetuity. They are actually idiots because such an entity cannot accumulate a memory. On the other hand, the on-going exercise of corporate entitites devouring their common workers means real people, with real children and real lives are experiencing only the destructive part of "creative destruction." It is obvious we are creating a new multi-generational cohort of citizens who will henceforth and forever until death be skeptical of corporate free market mercantilism and its associated elites. Even a police state becomes an unmanageable failure when the component real people citizens simply dismiss the efforts of the state or its elites to govern. The US' future is already fixed-it will devolve into a banana republic.

[VG]

Okay folks, it's time for us to grow up. It's time to move to a socialist society. I know socialism hasn't worked in the past. The key is that it doesn't work in money systems. Money is the cause of all our problems. We need to move away from money towards "energy credits", a form of currency which has fundamental value (a toothbrush requires a certain amount of energy to create, thus it has an energy cost). Everyone gets equal energy credits. Yes, this eliminates the drive for innovation to some extent. However, our civilization has reached the plateau phase, and we need to get to a zero growth stable system. Infinite growth can only occur in the mind of a madman or an economist. Once we stablize and get everyone up to a minimum standard of living, once everyone can afford to eat, once we get our houses in order, then we can worry about innovation.