Great Depression | featured news

Europe is caught in an economic pincer: slow-growth assaults from one side; fickle financial markets from the other. One obvious way out — the China option — seems barred by geopolitics. There is precedent. Historians blame the Great Depression’s severity in part on poor international cooperation. Economist Charles Kindleberger found a vacuum of power: Great Britain, the old economic leader, could no longer lead alone; and the United States — a replacement — wasn’t ready to help. Is there a parallel today between the United States and China? Are we repeating the mistakes of the 1930s? Unsettling questions.

Home prices have now fallen farther from their peak than they did during the Great Depression. Since 2006, the average home price has fallen 26%, according to Zillow.com. That’s a greater percentage than the 25.9% drop registered from the plunge that helped kick off the Great Depression from 1928-1933.

World leaders must defuse currency tensions before they worsen to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, the head of the World Bank said on Thursday.

The government's giant bank bailout may well have averted a second Great Depression, economists say, but a lot of voters aren't buying it. Support for the program is turning into a kiss of death for many in Congress.

The longest U.S. recession since the Great Depression ended in June 2009, lasting 18 months, the National Bureau of Economic Research said.

The Congress on Thursday approved the broadest overhaul of financial rules since the Great Depression and sent it to President Barack Obama to sign into law.

The House of Representatives was expected to approve the biggest changes in financial regulation since the Great Depression on Friday, marking a win for the Obama administration.

The U.S. manufacturing sector grew in August for the first time in over a year and a half, while pending home sales surged to a two-year high in July, adding to mounting evidence the longest economic slowdown since the Great Depression is ending.

A White House spokesman said Wednesday that the United States has avoided falling off an economic cliff, citing as evidence a new report showing factory orders rose in June for the fourth time in five months, an unexpected gain and the latest sign that the ailing manufacturing sector is recovering.

The Obama administration's aggressive plan for strict scrutiny of hedge funds and other freewheeling investors, part of the biggest expansion of financial restraints since the Great Depression, is drawing instant opposition from Republican lawmakers and the rules' targets. And skeptics are questioning whether the new rulebook would work anyway.