Depression Fear Mongers Obscure the True Concerns: Amity Shlaes

This year is supposed to be like 1932. That’s what you would believe after reading commentators who compare current patterns in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to those at the end of Herbert Hoover’s presidency.

To focus on these stock patterns is to be like weather forecasters who talk about the heat index or wind chill. They are gilding the statistical lily. The ungilded reality: today the Dow is down about 30 percent from its 2007 high, nowhere near its decline of 89 percent between September 1929 and July 1932. Today, joblessness in the U.S. is a bit less than 10 percent; in 1932 it was 25 percent.