Looking at that chart.
You notice that whenever the debt starts to climb, we go into a recession. Intresting.
This bailout is nothing but repeating the same mistake over. Throwing money down a hole for the fat cats to steal and bailing out some influential Congress people and their families.
You must be seeing a different chart. Looks to me as if we spent our way out of the Carter recession, and haven’t looked back since.
We have no such ability, in the current situation. Look at the hundreds of billions that have already been spent, since March. All it has bought has been a little time, less and less each go ‘round. We’ve gone from months initially, to weeks, and now, apparently, to days.
However the y axis is a ratio.
It looks like the peak is after 1929. If debt were constant and the economy shrank (say because of a depression) the ratio would rise without any increase in the debt.
The current situation would appear to be different with a long rise in the debt even as the economy grew. The current situation would appear to be the final assembly of a "rogue" wave caused by a lack of internal savings, over expansion of low quality, long term debt, high oil prices and an inelasticity of oil demand with oil sucking even more money out of the US than the long term ,lousy balance of payments would otherwise do, deficit spending by the gov't (not doing the spending on real long term investments) and apparently an overhang of naked "derivatives".