Kellner's Calm Perspective

Irwin Kellner, chief economist of MarketWatch:

If you look at the data, you will see more differences than similarities between the 1930s and today:

• In the crash of 1929 the Dow Jones industrials plunged 40% in two months; this time around it has taken a year to fall 22%.
• The jobless rate jumped to 25% by 1933; it is little more than 6% today.
• The gross domestic product shrank by 25% during the early 1930s; it is up over 3% during the past year.
• Consumer prices fell by about 30% from 1929 to 1933; and the last time I looked they were still rising.
• Home prices dropped more than 30% during the Depression vs. about 16% today.
• Some 40% of all mortgages were delinquent by 1934 compared with 4% today.
• In the 1930s, more than 9,000 banks failed compared with fewer than 20 over the past couple of years.

Remember also it was policy errors, not the stock market crash, that caused the Great Depression:

• Instead of increasing the money supply, the Federal Reserve of that era reduced it by one-third.
• Instead of lowering taxes, Herbert Hoover raised them.
• And to channel whatever demand was left into U.S.-made goods, the government enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to keep out foreign products; this only provoked our trading partners to do the same.

Add to this today's automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, the FDIC to insure bank deposits and circuit breakers to keep stocks from falling too quickly, and you can see why this is not a depression in any way shape or form.

Kellner makes sense - I might have written this. But here are two counterpoints:

1. This recession is just getting started. Many of the stats on the 1930s cover, well, the 1930s.  A whole decade.  Aren't we just getting started?

2.  Many of the firewalls in place now have never been tested, let alone broken. Does this raise the stakes? The point is that the modern economy has more safeguards, but has it not also more complexity, hence systemic risk. Were there anything like hedge funds in 1929?