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My partner (retired) spends a lot of time investing and reading up on economics, recession/depression, etc.
I got a chart that shows recessions/depressions throughout our contemporary history -- some "worse" than others (although, to people trying to make ends meet, ANY recession/depression is bad). Anyway, after looking at it and the underpinnings of each recession/depression, I was impressed by a couple of things:
1] Nearly all of them started/resulted from Republican economic/tax policies, combined with deregulation and an overemphasis in "investment" spending without any emphasis on the longterm outcomes.
2] The recession in which we currently find ourselves is different than past recessions because mortgage investment firms have sold off so much of their debt (MBS) to foreign countries, who are selling them off as our dollar dives.
3] It's different because the financial services sector has been traveling under the radar for a very long time (back, at least to the 80s) and now the result is coming due.
At least this is the way I understood the explanations.
