I'm a little tired

of hearing Barack Obama refer to the current economic situation as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. As if a recession were ANYTHING like a depression.

Besides that, it doesn't appear to be remotely true. The generally accepted definition of a recession is 2 consecutive quarters (or more) of negative GDP growth.

I've had a little trouble finding officially published monthly GDP data for the third quarter, and the third quarter summary hasn't yet been issued, but:
According to this site in July, the GDP shrunk by 1.9%, grew by 1.1% in August, and shrunk again by 1.0% in September for a net loss of 1.8%.

According to the Department of Commerce:

• Q4 '90 and Q1 '91 had 3% and 2% drops in GDP.
• Q4 '81 and Q1 '82 had 4.9% and 6.4% drops.
• Q2 '80 and Q3 '80 had 7.8% and 0.7% drops.
• Q3 '74 thru Q1 '75: 3.8% drop, 1.6% drop, 4.7% drop (3 quarters)
• Q4 '57 and Q1 '58: 4.2% and 10.4% drops.
• Q3 '53 thru Q1 '54: 2.4%, 6.2%, and 2.0% drop (3 quarters)
• Q1 '49 and Q2 '49: 5.8% and 1.2% drops

These are SEVEN significant recessions in the last sixty years. Three of them were in the last thirty years. The thing is, people have gotten so used to the stock market going up - like home values - that they started to believe it would always happen. People have extremely short memories.

So how bad was the depression. Heck if I know. I wasn't around at the time. That's true for most of the voter base, and that's why Obama gets away with saying it.

This is probably really good

But I can't figure out what tune it's supposed to be to.
Yakko’s Bailout