The D Word



It's time to face a fact that, seemingly, nobody on either side of the political divide can state openly yet.  

The United States is not in a recession any more, it is in a depression.

Stating this is made a little problematic by the fact that, though there is a generally agreed upon definition of a recession (2 successive quarters of GDP contraction,) curiously there is no definition of the word depression.

Anyway, let's take a look at the GDP in the United States during the Great Depression:




Note that, during the entire three and a half years from the 1929 stock market crash until Franklin Delano Roosevelt was able to get the Republicans out of the White House, the economy continued to collapse, eventually resulting in a total drop of the nation's GDP of right around 30%.

Under Donald Trump's leadership, our GDP collapsed 32.9% in one quarter, or more than the entire collapse in the great depression.  

Of course, we have people all over the place telling us not to worry, it will go back up next quarter, but that is what Republicans, up to the President and Secretary of the Treasury, constantly said during those three bleak years.


And I have warned for years that the United States does not have the industrial base any more to fight its way out of a real depression.  This may truly be the end of the American experiment, as the country breaks apart into chaos and anarchy, ruled over by little more than warlords.

Comments

Infidel753 said…
Actually, the economy has contracted by about 9% in one quarter. The 32.9% figure is an "annualized" one, meaning how much the economy would contract if the same rate of collapse continued for an entire year. The annualized figure is always calculated and released for quarterly changes in the economy, even though in this case it's pretty meaningless.

This still qualifies as a depression, though, if you go by the size of the surge in unemployment, which is much more relevant to the average person than the GDP is. I don't have the numbers handy, but I think the recent jump in unemployment is actually worse than in any quarter in the Great Depression.
August 2, 2020 at 6:44 AM
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