HOW BAD IS IT?….Andy McCarthy asks:
The Worst Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression?
That’s the Obamanomics mantra. Should be we really be letting that slide by without a response? Going to high school in the Carter Seventies, I remember sitting in the gas lines. Toward the end of Carter’s tenure, interest rates were around 20%, inflation was at close to 14%, and unemployment was just over 7% (it soared over 10% before the Reagan recovery kicked in).
I don’t mean to minimize the straits we’re in, and I appreciate that things are likely to get worse — maybe a lot worse — before they get better. But aren’t Democrats skipping over a pretty awful bit of history when they say this is as bad as it’s been in 75 years?
Well, look: interest rates hit 20% because Paul Volcker put them there in order to fight inflation. But it’s not inflation that that’s the measure of a recession, it’s output growth and employment. And at least at the moment, the projections for output and employment over the next year are about as bad as they were in 1980-82 — and that’s even without an oil shock to kick things off. Add to that the fact that the financial system is collapsing worldwide, entire countries are going bankrupt, a couple of dozen really big banks have gone bust, and credit markets are still frozen despite trillions of dollar in various interventions from national governments, and yeah, I’d say this is the worst financial crisis since the Depression. Does anybody really want to take the other side of that debate?