Vicious circle of financial contraction

Paul Krugman didn't just now say this for the first time. He has been making the point of our willful forgetting for years.

I made it, too, last week and also not for the first time.

American economic power is already under threat. The consequences of a deep worldwide recession - or a bona fide depression - are too unpredictable to be sure of, but the Great Depression did these things:

• Stoked extreme ideologies on the left and the right
• Led to WWII
• Killed people with poverty
• Moved the economic center of the world (from Europe to the U.S.)

I'd venture a guess that we in the U.S. don't want any of these things to happen again, but we haven't acted that way since the 1970s.

Image in the public domain.