Helen Thomas: It's a Depression

[n2doc]

It's a depression
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- Few prominent economists will say it, but to me it looks and feels like we are in another Great Depression or a reasonable facsimile.

The current meltdown is dubbed a "financial crisis." But a rose by any other name would still inflict the same hardship and suffering on most people and businesses.

Clearly, the lessons have not been learned from the Herbert Hoover era. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, says the current banking crisis is "functionally similar to that of the Great Depression."

"Many of the symptoms" are the same, including the impotence of monetary policy -- like cuts in interest rates -- that has not halted the economic downturn.

Typically, the current Republican administration has acted first to bail out the collapsed financial industry, with few strings attached. Belatedly, the government now has come up with an $800 billion program for hard-pressed average Americans to make it easier to get loans for homes, cars and education or borrow through credit cards.

The moves evoke the old quip on Capitol Hill: "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money."

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