The “Great Depression” was actually a three – four year depression followed by a recovery, followed by a nasty recession later in the decade – GNP actually grew 8 percent in 1934, 8 percent in 1935, 14 percent in 1936, and 5 percent in 1937.

So imagine what would our world be like today if the FED did not bail out AIG, did not have access to the TARP, and all those cascading institutions were allowed to fail. You’re honestly saying that would remind you of the Great Depression even a little bit?

March 15th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
We’re witnessing Class A online obfuscation when people cherry-pick dates from the 1929-1941

…….Er…..actually I was cherry picking the inception of the GD from 1929 to 1933……Perhaps you’d like point out where 1941 was mentioned…..What’s magic about 1933 is that it was the depth of the GD by just about every econometric measure …..Katrina?…..Galveston?…..Any more non sequiturs you want to throw in…..number of times Paris Hilton has had sex?…Favorite dogs in California……

flipspiceland Says:
March 15th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
No. The idea of regulation at the Federal Level for something, an entity as important financial institutions should be a State run authority…….(3 sectional ones for Californica and other large population states)

………So this would give us something like 9500 banks regulated by say 75-100 separate regulatory authorities overseen by house and senate committees in 50 state houses……..Yep…. this makes entire sense

A single State authority (3 sectional ones for Californica and other large population states) or regional one can certainly get more done, ‘more better’ , and faster than a single Central authority with 10,000 banks to watch over. It’s easier for the proletariat to rise up in revolt against Harrisburg, than it would be to rise up against the White House.

It appears that the reason why Central Banking is the way things run in this country is to mask, not expose, the shenanigans going on behind the curtain.

I don’t expect, especially the way Bernanke is acting with AIG,—not giving the people who now own this institutiont–the information they demand, AS OWNERS, that this would ever be permitted. Why?

I leave it to your imagination. You can bet it’s not for the people.

Buddy, you’re right on the money, so stick to your guns.
We’re witnessing Class A online obfuscation when people cherry-pick dates from the 1929-1941 period to ‘prove’ that March 2009 is hardly an economic crisis in terms of unemployment, bank failures, etc.
First of all, there’s nothing magical about 1933. Secondly, we know we employ more sophisticated obfuscating algorithms on jobless numbers than in 1929, the BLS ‘birth-death’ model for small biz jobs being prima facie evidence.

Bank failures, by assets involved, can and should be one of many mileposts for where we are. And rather than count branches, use in your bank count the entire paper-trail of bank acquisitions by the financial institutions that received 2008 bailout funds separate from the TARP. And rather than count boarded-up banks, count FDIC/OCC/FRB seizures and sales.

On the flip-side, it is mind-numbingly juvenile to use 1929-1941 as nearly the sole benchmark for what is happening today. It would be like the national weather service offering up an easy-to-repeat goofy narrative of the horrific unnamed Hurricane of 1900 (Galveston) and her 6-12K death count as the primary measurement for issuing hurricane warnings and assessing damages in the decades since, and concluding that America has had no hurricane problems for over 70 years as evidenced by the ‘fact’ that no hurricane has come close to even the low-end of Galveston’s 6k deaths …and offering further goofy headlines like “Katrina’s 1,836 deaths made her a mere 31% of the Galveston storm and thus also renders her irrelevant as a real hurricane! America is technically hurricane-proof!”

The NWS would be discredited and their mgmt removed. Any media sources that parroted such NWS rubbish would likewise be discredited and fold thru loss of ad revenues.
It’s time we begin to explore responding to today’s obfuscators in like fashion; it is one thing to make the case that one emotionally wants all of today’s economic nightmares to go away; that’s an understandable human response. But it is another to willfully wage online campaigns to obfuscate and cherry-pick data and not expect sustained long-term credibility repercussions.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_banks_in_US

March 15th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
zot23 Says:

zot23, You miss two very importnant points: The first is that if you calculate unemployment the way it was caclulated in 1933, we are currently at over 18%. (John Williams, Mint.com etc. etc.) and we only hit that 4 years after 1929. The second is we didn’t have the large conglomerate bankins sytems we have now. Add up all the branches of WAMU, Citibank, Wachovia etc and we probably have the same or greater individual bank branch failures.

……..Unemployment calculations are a bit of moveable feast but even if one accepts your premise there is of course the fact that many analysts believe the 25% figure is way below what it actually was in 1933……And does your local mall or 5th Avenue really “smell” like 1933? I didn’t see many apple sellers on 5th on Friday. As for the banking system it was its very fragmentation that was one of the major sources, arguably the main source, of banking instability back then……Fewer big institutions regardless of how many outlets they have are actually much easier to both prop up and regulate……..In fact the US banking system is still incredibly fragmented by comparison with other countries and it’s one of the reasons for the continuing regulatory problems……The sooner we get 50 banks for the SEC to regulate the better