Posted on 03/06/2009 9:24:14 PM PST by FocusNexus
So let me do the preachers of Armageddon one better. Today's stock market isn't just the “worst since the Great Depression,†like they're so fond of saying. No, it's even worse than the Great Depression.
Take a look at the chart, below. It shows the daily progress of the S&P 500 in terms of percentage change from the very top. The brown line is the change from the recent all-time highs on October 9, 2007. The blue line is the change from the all-time highs just before the Great Depression, September 6, 1929.
As of yesterday's close (Thursday, March 5), the S&P 500 has lost 56.4% from its all-time highs 513 days ago. At the same point in the bear market associated with the Great Depression, that is at the 513 day mark, the S&P 500 had only lost -- only! -- 49%.
(Excerpt) Read more at smartmoney.com ...
Yikes! I didn’t see the whole picture at first viewing. Is that Helen Thomas in the Oval Office?
I think you nailed it. THAT is what it's really about.
Bottle caps will also be the new currency.
Radioactive mutants. Radroaches. A barren wasteland with scorched trees and horrid scrub brush will hid the mangled corpses and gnawed bones of the lucky -- those who died early.
This is the reality. We will scavange bent-tin cans for a few coins, as the radioactive wind howls over us. Get used to it.
You know, I really hate you optimists who sugar-coat everything. Everyone KNOWS that there won't be any bent-tin cans left because they're not ecologically friendly!
Laz - Have you watched Babylon AD? The first 10 minutes of that movie portrays what I think major US cities will look like in a few years. The rest of the movie is so-so.
Laz, you need a woman.
Oh crap!
Is that Aushwitz?
““Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
That’s exactly what my parents believed and discussed all durring the depression.
Having lived through it and having politically active and conservative parentss my education was 180 out of phase with the thinking of the times.
They worked hard durring it and saved enough to start the business without borrowing money and build a 2,400 sq. ft. home in a high end neighborhood in 1936.
bookmark
I was 1.0 years old in 1936....but I remember learning in later years how frugality, hard work, commonsense, and above all, integrity were the values that kept people going through the the thin times.
I wonder if our nation has a great enough percentage of the population that holds those values today to see us through
the O’Pression.
Yeah, it’s been almost steadily down since it became clear that That One would be the Democrat nominee, with an even more precipitious drop since the election. No vote of market confidence there.
I seriously doubt it, we are the smallest generation and are dying off!
The 3 generations after ours lack the work ethic and don’t know how to live without credit.
They never learned to work with their hands and tools.
Juat like cars, all the advances were really invented years ago and incorporated in race cars and hot rods by people that are over 70 today.
If they had elected Lenin in 1930, they would have been in the same situation we are now.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2136635/posts
“Are you looking for a job?”
Note: This thread is updated on a regular basis.
The Great Depression was “great” because of monumentally bad monetary policy. Our monetary policy hasn’t been great this past decade or so, but it’s been leaps and bounds better than during the Great Depression.
See Milton Friedman’s “A Monetary History of the United States.”
You all might enjoy this thread:
Is Recession Preparing a New Breed of Survivalist? [Survival Today - an On going Thread #2]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2181392/posts
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