And if Obama doesn’t do this, then what?
You mean the ones in my OP? Whyfore? (One of the disadvantages of knowing little about economic matters.)
What if it turns out to be merely a Good Depression or a Fair-to-Middling Depression?
I sense some people aren’t really taking the article seriously. 
Is it a reflection of how seriously they take the assertions in said article, or do they actually agree with it (at least partially), and it’s just that the field was open for easy jokes? 
True to some extent, but if families start en masse cancelling their cable, internet, cell phones, etc., it’s going to cause one hell of a ripple effect.
I think his point in comparing the current situation to post-WW2 downturns is that this seems to be something more severe than the typical “economic speed bump” recessions we’ve had for the previous 60 years. I hope this isn’t going to be another Great Depression, but it could turn into the sort of 10-year stagnation that Japan suffered after it’s real-estate crash in 1990.
Right now I own a home and a gun. If the day dawns that I don’t have a home anymore but I still have a gun… we’ll see.
If you don’t have criminal instincts by now, becoming homeless won’t give them to you. The Bonnie and Clyde/John Dillinger/Pretty Boy Floyd/etc. criminal population of the early Great Depression was mostly made up of people who had showed a criminal bent since their childhood.
It’s definitely more sever than most recessions. No one denies that. But saying that unemployment is worst today than it was during the Depression is sensationalist bullshit. It’s not worst today than during the Depression era. Even if you believe all the folks who say that government is hiding the ‘true’ unemployment figures. Double the unemployment figures as we STILL aren’t at Depression era unemployment numbers. You’d need to triple them or more to get to that level of unemployment.
Again, afaik no one is saying that this recession hasn’t been particularly bad. It has been. But trying to equate what’s happening today with what happened during the Depression is basically the same tactic used to try and compare the Iraqi war with Vietnam, as folks were trying to do…and for much the same reason.
-XT
Yeah, no one ever seems to think about the consequences of this. Lost jobs being the primary one.
You can’t take anyone seriously who doesn’t understand that.
Yes, that is true. But each ripple is less than the previous one. I think the concept that would define that is called the “money multiplier” or some such. Its a measure of how “many times” a dollar circulates through the economy.
Or in fancier mathmatical terms, its the sum of an infinite series of fractions where each fraction is fraction of the previous fraction and the total sum of the infinite series is a finite number less than 1.
Or in other words, there are ripples, but they decrease and cause a finite amount of damage, they don’t increase until everybody is out of a job.
A made up example might be something like lets say 10 percent of the work force is for whatever reason suddenly jobless (the Chinese quit buying Chia pets made in the good old USA perhaps). Okay, those folks quite buying American services/products and that results in more job losses and those folks buy less and so on and so on and so on… The end result from all those ripples might be something like 15 percent total end up jobless. Numbers totally made up, this is just an example.
That depends on the size of the initial splash. A ton of cell phone contracts dropping is not a big enough splash to become the next big disaster movie title.
The subprime collapse, however, took a LOT of stimulus dollars and a few QE’s to mitigate that tsunami.