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Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

I also think it's interesting that the 2008 mortgage crisis was very close to becoming just as bad as the great depression, but fiscal policy prevented that.

It's easiest to see this in side by side charts. The magnitude of stock market losses and economic data was tracking almost exactly with the great depression, until the central banks intervened.

Global stock markets: https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg...

U.S. Unemployment: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...

Global Industrial production: https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg...

We're still feeling ripple effects from 2008, but things aren't nearly as bas as they could have been.

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> I also think it's interesting that the 2008 mortgage crisis was very close to becoming just as bad as the great depression, but fiscal policy prevented that.

Compare unemployment in the Great Depression vs Great Recession:

https://i.imgur.com/pjyczeq.png

Fiscal policy certainly did help, but the Great Recession probably would have still been significantly smaller than the Great Depression for several reasons.

(I suspect the Great Recession is more analogous to the Long Depression of the late 19th century, in that both of them significantly worsened inequality, while the Great Depression reduced inequality. I suspect whenever the US starts dealing with its mountain of debt, the resulting recession/panic/depression will also reduce inequality, though I doubt too many people will be cheering that when it happens).

> Compare unemployment in the Great Depression vs Great Recession:

The second chart I linked does exactly that. The point is to not look at the absolute numbers because, the unemployment trend in 2008 was reversed by fiscal policy, but during the great depression there was no such intervention.

Until the central banks intervened, unemployment was tracking almost exactly with the great depression.

You also can't compare the absolute unemployment numbers for a lot of other reasons. A major one is that unemployment (The U6 number, i.e. "real unemployment") in the first half of the century was consistently 10%+ higher than it is today. That's because of less women in the workforce.

In 1929, the workforce was considered fully employed with an unemployment rate (U6) of 15%. In 2008, we considered a fully employed workforce to be just 5% unemployment.

> but fiscal policy prevented that.

That fiscal policy prevented collapse in 2008 by creating an unimaginably large asset bubble we're still living in.

> We're still feeling ripple effects from 2008, but things aren't nearly as bas as they could have been.

Those aren't ripple effects, it's the strain from an unsustainable "solution" to a crisis we still haven't really felt yet.

What would you have done differently than the treasury and fed did?

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