Bill Kerr: economic downturn comparisons

Monday, February 23, 2009

Shows where we are at compared with the Great Depression

Click on image for larger view
Source: Graph of historic financial collapses

Anonymous said...: I think the graph is accurate though I got a bit suspicious since it's comparing the Dow of 1929-'32 with the S&P 500 since then. Why not compare the Dow all the way along? It would show the same thing I think.

The graph does not give a full picture of economic crises. I noticed that the graph does not include the economic downturn from 1977-1984, but this is because the market only went down about 20% from 1977-1980. The market trended upward after that, but the way in which this period was significant was in unemployment, which trended upward starting in 1979, and peaked at 10.8% in 1982. This was the highest it had gotten to since the Great Depression. The highest the unemployment rate got to between 1973-'76 was about 9%.

Where we are now in the unemployment rate, 7.6%, is the same as the peak unemployment rate in 1992. Like the period from 1980-84, from 1990-'92 unemployment rose as the market went up.

We anticipate unemployment is going to get worse as the year progresses. This downturn is like the tech crash of 2000, in that unemployment is rising while the market goes down, though the unemployment rate was relatively mild from 2001-'03, reaching a peak of 6.3%. I can tell you it felt a lot worse than that in the field of work I'm in. It was a "tech depression" as far as we were concerned.; February 24, 2009 9:02 AM

Bill Kerr