The US's Great Recession

This graphic from the Calculated Risk blog is the best illustration of how this is the worst recession since the Great Depression:

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This is "the big one" but unfortunately the US government didn't respond that way. Instead of a massive infrastructure program and a CCC or WPA effort to get people employed, the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have focused on giving trillion dollar handouts to Wall Street banks as the way to "revive" the economy. Well, a number of bankers are laughing all the way back to their banks as they declare record profits and huge bonuses for themselves.

Here's a nice graphic from an article by Murat Tasci of the Cleveland Federal Reserve published in on The Big Picture blog. It is a different way of making the point in the above graphic, i.e. the Great Recession is much bigger, deeper, and longer than the other post WWII recessions: