Sizing Up this Current Economic Catastrophe

From a post on Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture blog, we get a reminder of just how severe the current economic "woes" have been:

... the recession does not truly end until economic activity makes a new peak. For the moment, that has not happened. One could argue that August 2011 is the 44th month since the Great Recession began (December 2007). Only the Great Depression (which lasted 43 months from August 1929 to March 1933) and the Panic of 1873 (65 months from October 1873 to March 1879) took longer to make a new peak in economic activity.

Sadly, the wealthy are on their way to healing but the bottom 90% are still struggling.

Here's Barry Ritholtz giving a talk in Vancouver. At 3:00 into the video he talks about his book "Bailout Nation" and the housing bubble in the US and the kind of corruption in the financial industry that allowed this to happen:



At 8:00 he is into a rant about the corruption of the rating agencies and then at 8:20 he calls American's Congress even more corrupt because they have been bought off by the financial industry.

At 11:15 he makes the point I like to make. Don't be pessimistic and listen to the doomsayers because "the world has always been going to hell in a handbasket".