Many writers and politicians today have been quick to compare the current economy to the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Barack Obama has frequently made this connection, saying things like, “We are going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
As the nation grapples with its worst recession since the 1930s, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is opening an exhibition of paintings from the first U.S. government program that supported the arts nationally during the Great Depression.
In sheer size, the economic measures announced by President Barack Obama to address "a crisis unlike we've ever known" are remarkable, rivaling and in many cases dwarfing the New Deal programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt famously created to battle the Great Depression.
Savoring his first big victory in Congress, President Barack Obama on Saturday celebrated the newly passed $787 billion economic stimulus bill as a "major milestone on our road to recovery."
Paris' haute couture designers turned up their noses at the recession, delivering opulent spring-summer collections that obstinately refused to pay the gloomy global economic situation any mind.
Mired in indecision and uncertainty, the world's foremost gathering of the best and brightest in government and business failed to come up with any new plan to stem, much less reverse, the global financial meltdown.
By every measure — lost jobs, plunging stock prices, scarce credit and a profound loss of confidence in the banking system — the economy is in awful shape.
Renault SA's chief Carlos Ghosn said Tuesday that carmakers are facing the worst crisis since the Great Depression and urged European governments to save the auto industry from collapse.
Before a jubilant crowd of more than a million, Barack Hussein Obama claimed his place in history as America's first black president, summoning a dispirited nation to unite in hope against the "gathering clouds and raging storms" of war and economic woe.
The Democratic-dominated Congress convenes Tuesday to confront perhaps the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and to grapple with a hugely ambitious agenda set by President-elect Barack Obama.
Just a second, 2009. It's going to take a little longer to say goodbye to the worst economic year since the Great Depression, but all for good cause. The custodians of time will ring in the New Year by tacking a "leap second" onto the clock Wednesday to account for the minute slowing of the Earth's rotation. The leap second has been used sporadically at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich since 1972, an adjustment that has kept Greenwich Mean Time the internationally agreed time standard.
President-elect Barack Obama has increased his employment goal with the nation's economic outlook worsening, seeking to create or save 3 million jobs in the next two years instead of the 2.5 million he proposed last month.
Three months after the government seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, lawmakers on Tuesday blamed former top executives at the mortgage giants for fueling the financial market turmoil that has dragged the country into a recession.
President George W. Bush got a second bloc of world leaders to endorse comprehensive action to remedy the global financial crisis. But his successor, Barack Obama, is already setting the coming economic agenda.
Back in 1930, as the Great Depression started its long, tortuous reign, it was mentioned to New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth that he made more money than President Herbert Hoover.
As more and more economists compare the nation’s current financial crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s, it begs the question — will the movies be as good? That decade was, after all, Hollywood’s Golden Age, producing movies that remain some of the greatest ever to emerge from the studio system.
The words have been repeated over and over: This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Political allegiances are as divided as football loyalties in the country's heartland, home to deeply depressed economies, middle America values and profound doubts about whether either Barack Obama or John McCain will be able to reverse the worst financial turmoil this country has seen since the Great Depression.
Wall Street ended a tumultuous two-week run relatively quietly Friday, finishing another back-and-forth session mixed as investors were cheered by signs of easing in the credit markets and managed to absorb lackluster economic news with equanimity. But while there was less volatility than during recent sessions, analysts warned that the market still faces rough times.
Big banks started falling in line Tuesday behind a rejiggered bailout plan that will have the government forking over as much as $250 billion in exchange for partial ownership — putting the world's bastion of capitalism and free markets squarely in the banking business.
The New Deal it is not. The government's biggest economic bailout since the Great Depression is aimed not at relieving unemployment or reforming questionable business practices, but at resuscitating financial markets debilitated by lousy bets on the housing market.
White House rivals John McCain and Barack Obama combined televised attack ads with statesmanlike appeals for bipartisanship on Tuesday as they vied for political gain in the shadow of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
In a stunning vote that shocked the capital and worldwide markets, the House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation's financial system, ignoring urgent warnings from President Bush and congressional leaders of both parties that the economy could nosedive without it. The Dow Jones industrials plunged nearly 800 points, the most ever for a single day.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said Wednesday that the United States could be headed for another Great Depression if Congress doesn't act on the financial crisis.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin says the United States could be headed for another Great Depression if Congress doesn't act on the financial crisis.
Video interview with elderly women who lived during the Great Depression.
In The Bank of England's incredible 315 year history no Governor has ever tried it, not even in very bad times before.
President Obama, is often compared to the late great Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who history books have romanticized as being the one responsible for guiding the country through the Great Depression of the 1930's.
An array of reports show some 1,200 people living in a growing tent city outside the California capital Sacramento, as more and more people are left homeless by the housing crisis. The UK's Daily Mail on Friday detailed the community, noting echoes of the Depression era.
I saw this on TV tonight. The woman is charming, and might I say she looks great for being 91! Good tips when times are tough!
By June 1930, with the depression 8 months old, "[t]he panic had subsided and the wreckage had been cleared away.
One feels almost unpatriotic, entertaining negative thoughts about Obama's grand plan. But it is far from clear that spending oceanic sums of money is the right corrective.
As for the financial-system crisis, Johnson also took a somewhat anti-government conservative view toward its causes, saying "this climate was caused by many well-intentioned policies - stimulated by individuals at high levels in government and sanctioned by regulatory structur …
Even if we survive Washington's spending spree, Congress and the Obama administration could still tip us into catastrophe if they sharply raise taxes or tariffs as Congress did in 1930 and '32. But more ominous parallels to an earlier age should not escape our notice.
A few select quotes during the depression years of 1929 to 1931.
Make it last, use it up, make do or do without. My parents lived through the Great Depression of 1929-1941. A few lessons about how to get by on less can be gleaned from their stories of living through that historic and traumatic period.
In the present recession, advocates of government intervention often evoke the specter of the Great Depression. Unless the government intervenes massively, we are told, we risk an economic collapse comparable to that of the 1930s.
NEW YORK — "Even the experts don't quite know what's going on."
In all, the plans would raise the federal portion of the U.S. economy to some 31 percent, more than twice the level after eight years of FDR's historic New Deal spending.
Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.
Wingnuts do love their false dilemmas, don't they? Look, in normal times, using the floor of the Senate to kiss El Rushbo's boil-laden ass is bad enough. But while the country slides into another Great Depression? It's criminal.
"There is no comparison to the Great Depression and where we are now," Carter said. "The Great Depression was much more severe. Right now, we have 7 percent unemployment. In the Great Depression, it was four times that. Back then, there was no money."
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show joblessness in the 1930s bumping around in the teens and moving back up toward 20 percent later that decade -- years after the New Dealers first spoke of "bold, persistent experimentation." These numbers include long-term public-sector job …
An incisive and self-critical look at the profession of academic economics as revealed by the inadequacy of its response to the current global financial crisis.
Now, there's a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse.
Mr. Obama's analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future.
People's opinions are shaped by the times and their circumstances. Each person's view may change, but that is conditional upon exactly what that change is.
Underlying the partisan division over President Obama's stimulus bill is a dispute over history -- a decades-old debate between liberals and conservatives over the impact the New Deal had in bringing the country out of the Great Depression.
"There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy," President Barrack Obama
The track record is discouraging. Despite Franklin Roosevelt's aggressive spending, unemployment reached 25 percent in 1933, fell only to 14 percent by 1937, and was back up to 19 percent in 1939.1 In the end, the New Deal did little or nothing to resuscitate the economy.