In the immortal words of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
Don’t Panic.
The news media and their ‘financial pundits’ keep saying “This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”, which upsets me because it’s a flat out lie, designed I guess to increase ratings. Yes things are bad but common, every time there’s a big ‘crisis’ they say that. They said that about the 1987 stock market crash, they said that about the Junk Bond trading scandal of 1989 and the Savings and Loan Crisis and every big drop in the market since the Great Depression.
Some facts to put things into perspective:
In the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the Dow lost over 40% of it’s value (a value 10 times the budget of the Federal Government at that time. Of course the Govt. now spends so much more of our money…sigh.)
In in the 1987 Stock Market Crash, the Dow Jones lost 22.6% of it’s value. The Savings and Loan crisis cost the Taxpayers $124.6 billion.
The AIG $85 billion ‘bailout’ isn’t really a bailout because it’s a loan. They will still have to pay it off.
Today, the Treasury has proposed purchasing $10 billion in mortgage-backed securities and is looking for Congressional approval to extend as much as $50 billion (or some rumors say $100 billion.)
Could this become another Great Depression. Yes, if politicians start creating government entities and laws to ‘control’ the economy.
http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-Freeman/article.asp?aid=3097