Is This A Replay of 1929?

Newsweek, October, 2008 by Robert J. Samuelson

Unlike during the Great Depression the government is now a huge part of the economy. And officials have moved quickly, if clumsily, to contain the crisis.

Watching the slipping economy and Congress’s epic debate over the Treasury’s unprecedented $700 billion financial bailout, it is impossible not to wonder whether this is 1929 all over again. Even sophisticated observers invoke the comparison. Martin Wolf, the chief economic commentator for the Financial Times, began a recent column: “It is just over three score years and ten since [the end of] the Great Depression.” What’s frightening is not any one event but the prospect that things are slipping out of control. Panic—political as well as economic—is the enemy.

There are parallels between then and now; but...

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