Whether or not you agree with the federal legislation just passed and signed into law on October 3, 2008, I'm starting this thread so that we might have a serious discussion of our economy in the context of the threats now widely being promulgated that we are heading into another Great Depression.

Even if I could have been persuaded to support the bailout of New York's investment banking community, I never will be persuaded that the unprecedented level of power just handed to the Secretary of the Treasury was necessary to effect this legislation. In short, I think we could have gotten a significantly better deal. But that's done friends. There is no point in hacking away at the politics of it; we'll vote our representatives out of office on November 4 or we won't.

What I am more interested right now is a thoughtful discussion of the state of our republic's economy in the context of history — namely, the storied Great Depression that our elders lived through. If so much has changed since "Black Thursday" of 1929 to prevent its reoccurrence, why then are we being warned of its very real imminence in the year 2008? Just how legitimate are the claims are that our nation is, in fact, facing "The Great Depression 2.0" ("TGD2" for the purposes of this thread)?

This is a Reader's Thread: I invite you to post your academic & professional links/text to scholarly articles you find online in this thread. These include Historians, Economists, and other professionals who are making their case with the respect for history that the subject deserves. I will lead off with a good (mercifully short) primer on TGD1 just written by Niall Ferguson for TIME.

Welcome.

TYTBUDGET

TIME MAGAZINE

Thursday
OCTOBER 02, 2008

THE END OF PROSPERITY?
By Niall Ferguson

Congress's initial rejection of the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods. Historians define this as one of the critical steps that led to the Great Depression — a tipping point when the world realized that partisan self-interest had trumped global leadership on Capitol Hill.

It's fair to ask whether America's lawmakers could do it again. The bursting of the debt-fueled property bubble and the crippling losses suffered by banks, together with the political dithering of recent days, have set in motion a chain reaction that, in the worst-case scenario, could lead to something like a 21st century version of the Depression — even if a bailout package does eventually get approved.

The U.S. — not to mention Western Europe — is in the grip of a downward spiral that financial experts call deleveraging. Having accumulated debts beyond what's sustainable, households and financial institutions are being forced to reduce them. The pressure to do so results from a decline in the price of the assets they bought with the money they borrowed. It's a vicious feedback loop. When families and banks tip into bankruptcy, more assets get dumped on the market, driving prices down further and necessitating more deleveraging. This process now has so much momentum that even $700 billion in taxpayers' money may not suffice to stop it.

In the case of households, debt rose from about 50% of GDP in 1980 to a peak of 100% in 2006. In other words, households now owe as much as the entire U.S. economy can produce in a year. Much of the increase in debt was used to invest in real estate. The result was a bubble; at its peak, average U.S. house prices were rising at 20% a year. Then — as bubbles always do — it burst. The S&P Case-Shiller index of house prices in 20 cities has been falling since February 2007. And the decline is accelerating. In June prices were down 16% compared with a year earlier. In some cities — like Phoenix and Miami — they have fallen by as much as a third from their peaks. The U.S. real estate market hasn't faced anything like this since the Depression. And the pain is not over. Credit Suisse predicts that 13% of U.S. homeowners with mortgages could end up losing their homes.

Banks and other financial institutions are in an even worse position: their debts are accumulating even faster. By 2007 the financial sector's debt was equivalent to 116% of GDP, compared with a mere 21% in 1980. And the assets the banks loaded up on have fallen even further in value than the average home — by as much as 55% in the case of BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities.

To date, U.S. banks have admitted to $334 billion in losses and write-downs, and the final total will almost certainly be much higher. To compensate, they have managed to raise $235 billion in new capital. The trouble is that the net loss of $99 billion implies that they will need to shrink their balance sheets by 10 times that figure — almost a trillion dollars — to maintain a constant ratio between their assets and capital. That suggests a drastic reduction of credit, since a bank's assets are its loans. Fewer loans mean tighter business conditions on Main Street. Your local car dealer won't be able to get the credit he needs to maintain his inventory of automobiles. To survive, he'll have to lay off some of his employees. Expect higher unemployment nationwide.

Anyone who doubts that the U.S. is heading for recession is living in denial. On an annualized basis, real retail sales and industrial production are both declining. Unemployment is already at its highest level in five years. The question is whether we're headed for a short, relatively mild recession like that of 2001 — or a latter-day version of what the world went through in the 1930s: Depression 2.0.

THE HISTORICAL PARALLELS
We tend to think of the Depression as having been triggered by the stock-market crash of 1929. The Wall Street crash is conventionally said to have begun on "Black Thursday" — Oct. 24, 1929, when the Dow Jones industrial average declined 2% — though in fact the market had been slipping since early September. On "Black Monday" (Oct. 28), it plunged 13%, the next day a further 12%. Over the next three years, the U.S. stock market declined a staggering 89%, reaching its nadir in July 1932. The index did not regain its 1929 peak until 1954.

On Sept. 29 of this year, as investors and traders reacted to Congress's rejection of the bailout plan presented by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the stock market sell-off was dramatic: the Dow fell nearly 7% that day, a one-day drop that has been matched only 17 times since the index's birth in 1896. From its peak last October, the Dow has fallen more than 25%.

Yet the underlying cause of the Great Depression — as Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz argued in their seminal book A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960, published in 1963 — was not the stock-market crash but a "great contraction" of credit due to an epidemic of bank failures.

The credit crunch had surfaced several months before the stock-market crash, when commercial banks with combined deposits of more than $80 million suspended payments. It reached critical mass in late 1930, when 608 banks failed — among them the Bank of the United States, which accounted for about a third of the total deposits lost. (The failure of merger talks that might have saved the bank was another critical moment in the history of the Depression.)

As Friedman and Schwartz saw it, the Fed could have mitigated the crisis by cutting rates, making loans and buying bonds (so-called open-market operations). Instead, it made a bad situation worse by reducing its credit to the banking system. This forced more and more banks to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity, driving down bond prices and making balance sheets look even worse. The next wave of bank failures, between February and August 1931, saw commercial-bank deposits fall by $2.7 billion — 9% of the total. By January 1932, 1,860 banks had failed.

Only in April 1932, amid heavy political pressure, did the Fed attempt large-scale open-market purchases — its first serious effort to counter the liquidity crisis. Even this did not suffice to avert a final wave of bank failures in late 1932, which precipitated the first state "bank holidays" (temporary statewide closures of all banks).

When rumors that the new Roosevelt Administration would devalue the dollar led to widespread flight from dollars into gold, the Fed raised the discount rate, setting the scene for the nationwide bank holiday proclaimed by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 6, 1933, two days after his Inauguration — a "holiday" from which 2,500 banks never returned.

The obvious difference between then and now is that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has learned from history — not surprising, given that he once studied the Great Depression intensively. Since the onset of the credit crunch in August 2007, Bernanke has repeatedly cut the federal-funds rate from 5.25% down to an effective rate at one point last week of about 0.25%. He has pumped money into the financial system through a variety of channels: in all, about $1.1 trillion over the past 13 months.

The Treasury is also active in ways it wasn't during the Depression. Back then, conventional wisdom held that the government should try to run a balanced budget in a crisis, even if that meant cutting welfare spending and raising taxes. A generation of economists inspired by John Maynard Keynes taught us that this is precisely the wrong thing to do. Government deficits in a recession are good, the Keynesians argued, because they stimulate demand. The Bush Administration, which ran substantial deficits in the boom years, looks set to run an even larger deficit now.

Indeed, even without the $700 billion bailout, Paulson has already written some big checks — to cover the subsidized sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan, the nationalization of mortgage monsters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bailout of insurance giant AIG and the sales of Washington Mutual to JPMorgan and Wachovia to Citigroup. All of this will cost somewhere between $200 billion and $300 billion.

Some say you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. But that's what the Fed and the Treasury are attempting. Faced with the potential debacle of Depression 2.0, they have tried to calm the fears with up to $2 trillion of liquidity. Call it the Great Repression: a Depression denied.

WHY DEPRESSION 2.0 CAN STILL BE AVOIDED
At the moment, a reworked bailout deal seems likely to pass. But the world may still be heading for a severe downturn. Interbank lending remains stubbornly frozen, despite the Fed's liquidity fire hose. With WaMu and Wachovia wiped out, the stampede out of bank stocks and bonds will surely claim new victims. As the recession bites, Main Street firms will start going bust too. And the impact on the $62 trillion market for credit-default swaps could be explosive.

What's more, this is no longer an exclusively American crisis. European banks are going under as well. Growth rates in the euro zone and Japan have fallen further than in the U.S. Emerging markets too are suffering. With the exception of Brazil, stock markets in the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are now down about 40% or more on the year.

The notion that Asia has somehow "decoupled" itself from the U.S. now seems fanciful. China and America have come so close to merging financially that we can almost speak of "Chimerica." When Fannie and Freddie were on the brink of collapse, many were surprised to learn that fully a fifth of China's currency reserves was composed of their bonds. Small wonder. Having spent much of the past decade intervening on currency markets to prevent the appreciation of its renminbi, China has accumulated a huge hoard of dollar-denominated bonds. No foreign nation stands to lose more from a U.S. financial collapse.

In the end, what made the Great Depression so greatly depressing was that it was global. The combined output of the world's seven biggest economies declined nearly 20% from 1929 to 1932. The unemployment rate soared in the U.S. and Germany to a peak above 33%. World trade collapsed by two-thirds, not least because of retaliation to the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

But while we certainly face a global slowdown, we may yet avoid another depression. Now, unlike in the Great Depression, central banks and finance ministries know it's better to run deficits and print money than to suffer massive losses of output and jobs. And the introduction of U.S.-style deposit insurance in many countries means banks are less vulnerable to runs by depositors than they once were. Finally, the possibility still exists (though the odds are slimmer than they were a year ago) that the Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds could step in to recapitalize U.S. and European banks before they succumb to another great contraction.

Given the immensity of the crisis, a Congress-approved bailout may be just a short-term fix. But a short-term fix is better than no fix. If nothing else, it would signal to the world that — unlike in 1930 — the U.S. is doing what it can to avoid financial calamity and sidestep Depression 2.0.

I actually think this is more like the Panic of 1873, than is is of 1929.

(The Long Depression)

NEWSWEEK
IS THIS A REPLAY OF 1929?
by Robert J. Samuelson
October 3, 2008

Mr. Samuelson's Conclusion:
Our real vulnerability is a highly complex and interconnected global financial system that might resist rescue and revival.

bksavings, I'm unpersuaded by your 1873 analogy, if for no other reason than the tangible nature of the precious metals markets that are central to that event. It isn't that we have no tangible assets in this crisis (we do: real estate) so much as the fact that we are no longer on the gold standard.

This is the signal reason why I resist getting in the stock market. Absent (something) to be anchored to, the stock market has increasingly appeared to me to be ultimately anchored to a chimera: Human emotion; confidence, to be more precise. Combine this with a 24/7 cycle of universal information manipulation (the internet) and the opportunities to "Wag the Dog" just make my skin crawl. When hard news can be fashioned out of nothing, and assets, an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation, I look at the editorial comment (above) and understand all too well how our own best efforts might not be enough. Madonna sneezes . . . and the markets fall. It's that absurd to me.

But I would like to follow your thinking on this. What precisely captures your attention about 1873 that is similar to 2008?

We should probably throw in the Tulip Crisis somewhere here, as well lol.

TYTBUDGET

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
From the issue dated October 17, 2008

THE REAL GREAT DEPRESSION
The depression of 1929 is the wrong model for the current economic crisis

by Scott Reynolds Nelson

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for WalMärt consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.

The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, "economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval." Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms "tramp" and "bum," both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York's Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the "Coal and Iron Police," a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.

In Central and Eastern Europe, times were even harder. Many political analysts blamed the crisis on a combination of foreign banks and Jews. Nationalistic political leaders (or agents of the Russian czar) embraced a new, sophisticated brand of anti-Semitism that proved appealing to thousands who had lost their livelihoods in the panic. Anti-Jewish pogroms followed in the 1880s, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Heartland communities large and small had found a scapegoat: aliens in their own midst.

The echoes of the past in the current problems with residential mortgages trouble me. Loans after about 2001 were issued to first-time homebuyers who signed up for adjustablerate mortgages they could likely never pay off, even in the best of times. Real-estate speculators, hoping to flip properties, overextended themselves, assuming that home prices would keep climbing. Those debts were wrapped in complex securities that mortgage companies and other entrepreneurial banks then sold to other banks; concerned about the stability of those securities, banks then bought a kind of insurance policy called a credit-derivative swap, which risk managers imagined would protect their investments. More than two million foreclosure filings — default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions — were reported in 2007. By then trillions of dollars were already invested in this credit-derivative market. Were those new financial instruments resilient enough to cover all the risk? (Answer: no.) As in 1873, a complex financial pyramid rested on a pinhead. Banks are hoarding cash. Banks that hoard cash do not make short-term loans. Businesses large and small now face a potential dearth of short-term credit to buy raw materials, ship their products, and keep goods on shelves.

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment. Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)

The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.

In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India. Beyond that I would not hazard a guess. I still have microfilm to read.

— Scott Reynolds Nelson is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary

The fed, ECB, BOE, Aus. central bank and more will start cutting rates to save the market.

BERLIN — Germany's No. 2 commercial property lender, Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, says a euro35 billion (US$48 billion) rescue plan for the company had fallen apart after private lenders withdrew support.

Hypo said it would seek to stay in business through alternative measures, but it did not say what those might be.

The company says it's in the process of determining the consequences of the rescue plan's failure.

Hypo was the first German blue chip to seek a government rescue after running into trouble in mid-September as credit froze on international markets.

The plan - approved on Thursday by the EU - would have entailed the German government injecting euro27 billion (US$37 billion).

It would also have provided a liquidity line of credit from a consortium of several financial institutions.

"The consortium has now declined to provide the line," it said, without identifying the banks in the consortium. The government had said last week that none were foreign.

The German government had no immediate comment on the plan's collapse.

A spokeswoman for German financial regulator BaFin also declined to comment.

Those of you who are economics wonks will especially enjoy reading Bernanke's "Great Depression" speech to Washington and Lee University in 2004 HERE. I'm not reprinting it here because it's a bit thick heh.

hiddendragon, that was a fabulous post, mercifully concise. How do you think our situation relates specifically to the Japanese Nikkei crash of 1989? I ask because THIS PIECE by a foreign correspondent to the NYT concluded:
Then Japanese politicians, acting with the same sublime ineptitude that our own House of Representatives displayed this week, ignored a growing banking crisis and dithered on a bailout. And so I watched from Tokyo as a mighty economy melted like an iceberg in the Caribbean.
I'm not supporting the statement, but it does seem to support your view.

TYTBUDGET