How Bad Will It Be?

The US (and the world as a consequence) is in a recession/depression that is worse than most people believe. It is called The Great Recession because it most closely resembles the disaster of the Great Depression (caused by a bubble, a credit crunch, and their ineffective government action... worse then but similar to today).

Here's a picture from the Calculated Risk web site that makes it pretty obvious that this is both deeper and longer than any post Great Depression recession experienced in the US:


You can immediately see that the post-WWII recessions were deeper and recovered more quickly. That's because the US was more of an industrial nation. With the US mostly a services economy, recessions start more slowly and last longer as can be seen from the graph. On top of that, this is the deepest loss of jobs since the immediate post-WWII readjustment as industry switched from military production to civilian production.