A Tale of Two Depressions – Charts & Analysis by Barry Eichengreen & Kevin O’Rourke

I came across the following charts and had to share them. They are the work of Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke, and was published at voxEU.org on June 4th.

I suggest that you read their post and view their graphs in a quiet room and give yourself time to take them in.  They set the current discussion of “green shoots” in perspective and show that how bad things might seem today they can get worse. It is also worth noting that the first 50% correction of world stock markets took 27 months from the peak in 1929, whereas we achieved that in 10 months.  We are on the same path, but we are “smarter” now.  I hope.