World-News

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff277.html

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The second Great Depression

The Nation
by Nicholas von Hoffman

03/03/09

The pause morphed into the correction, which got transmogrified into the drop in business, which shifted into the crash. The crash became the slump, which changed into the downturn and/or the slide, or the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Scarier yet, President Barack Obama is now warning us that unless his rescue plan goes through, ‘our economic crisis could become a national catastrophe.’ What say you to that, sports fans? Many are starting to say it looks as though we are heading into — or are already in–another Great Depression But what might a depression be? Although the word has been used in connection with bad economic conditions since the late eighteenth century, there is no agreed-upon definition comparable to what economists have for the word ‘recession.’ There is agreement on one thing: a depression is a helluva lot worse then a recession. It means not just hard times, but very, very hard times lasting a very, very long time. Two, three, four, eight years. You might say a depression is an extended national catastrophe...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090316/howl



The market’s harsh verdict on Obamanomics

Christian Science Monitor
by Mark Skousen

03/04/09

Officially, President Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget is titled ‘A New Era of Responsibility.’ That’s false on two counts. It’s an era — not of responsibility, but of big-government taxation, spending, and regulation. And it’s not new. History is full of attempts to inflate the state to grow the economy. Virtually all have ended badly. As Monday’s sell-off reminds us, Wall Street’s verdict on Obamanomics has been quick and sharp. The president’s budget is right in castigating the ‘troubled past’ of the Bush administration, which spent money like a drunken sailor on education, healthcare, bailouts and two seemingly endless wars in the greater Middle East, with virtually no regard for how to pay for a rapidly growing national debt. But now we must confront the troubled future. Obama has adopted the big-spending policies of George W. Bush, with trillions more proposed for education, bailouts and healthcare. He wants to sharply reduce (but not end) the American presence in Iraq. At the same time, he plans to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, which may lead to an expanded quagmire there...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0304/p09s01-coop.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Staving Off Another Great Depression

Dean Baker, Truthout: "The Washington policy debates of the last week would almost make a casual observer believe that the nation's political leadership is in fact nostalgic for the good old days of the Great Depression when the country suffered double-digit unemployment for a decade. The two big news items last week were a batch of absolutely horrible economic reports and the release of President Barack Obama's budget. The media almost completely ignored the former and focused its attention primarily on the latter. So, let's start with the bad news."

http://www.truthout.org/030509L



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