1 Boring Old Man

Worst Since World War II

Remember how just a few weeks days ago, BushCo was trying to argue we weren’t yet in a recession? Well, all of a sudden, this the worst recession since World War II. There’s Marty Feldstein: "The United States has already slipped into a deep recession that could be the most serious since World War II," said Martin Feldstein, president of the Cambridge group that is considered the official word on economic cycles. "The situation is bad, it’s getting worse, and the risks are that the situation could be very bad," Feldstein said in a speech yesterday at a financial industry conference in Boca Raton, Fla.

And then there’s Mr. Andrea Mitchell: "The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war. It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities." This "worst since World War II" seems to be a favored euphemism, among economists, for Depression.

I’ve been reading Herbert Hoover speeches, just to get ready for what’s coming – blanket denials that the current Administration has had anything to do with the fact that we’re having a genuine Economic Depression in America and a bunch of conservative rhetoric about the fact that government has no role in righting what’s wrong. I expect that there will also be accusations that the Democrats/Liberals/Progressives/Immigrants/etc. have caused things to turn downhill. None of that will be the truth. The causes of our Depression are multiple, but the central ones are our outrageous spending on a fruitless and wrong war, and the complete inattentiveness to our economy in this eight year feeding frenzy by the business community – the central sinners being the energy industry and the lending institutions.

I hate to say it, but we need an Economic Depression to wake us up from the Republican led torpor that’s fallen over the country. This is why we had government regulation in the first place. This thing started the day Ronald Reagan got elected, was fueled by BushI, and was kicked into high gear by the Cheney/BushII era of massively irresponsible government at every level. It wasn’t their Conservatism. It wasn’t their Republicanism. It was their indifference and incompetence. We cannot expect to elect incompetent idealogues to our highest governmental offices and glide into the 21st century unscathed. It’s tragic that it’s going to take something like this to wake us up. But that’s where we are, and that’s where we’ll be for much longer than any of us like. As emptywheel says, "This ‘worst since World War II’ seems to be a favored euphemism, among economists, for Depression."