The Great Recession: A Comparative Analysis

The Great Depression officially started on October 29, 1929 after the stock market crash, and the Great Recession started in 2008 after the government pushed buying houses onto people. The Great Depression and Great Recession has almost seven decades between them, so some people would never think they would be similar. They might even say the President has learned from the Great Depression, so the economy will never get like that again. The economy almost did in the Great Recession. When comparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession, they have similar beginnings, similar responses by the president, and similar outcomes, but the differences are in the details.
The Great Depression and Great Recession started the same because of the governments …show more content…
In April 1939, unemployment was at almost 21 percent (Folsom). The Great Depression led to World War II because if the world would not have suffered, Hitler may not have ever come to power in Germany (Samuelson). The last time house prices lowered like the Great Recession was the Great Depression (Aliber). In 2008 when Obama took office unemployment was at eight percent, but almost a year later it was over ten percent, and he was surprised that even though he put large amounts of money into the economy, it still was not saving jobs (Folsom). Wisconsin’s unemployment rate throughout the Recession went from 4.5 percent in 2008 to 9.2 percent in 2010 to seven percent in 2013 (Raygo). The United States unemployment rate in 2013 was about eight percent which is better than mid 2010 when it was about 9.6 percent and will take a few more years to get back to pre-crisis rate of 4.5 percent (Chowdhury). The Great Depression and Great Recession recovers were both long processes but the government did slowly get back to the state it was in before the …show more content…
The government had a great effect on how bad the economy was during the Great Depression and Great Recession, but the government, both then and now, imposed taxes and poured money into the failing economy. The Presidents both had similar ideas to put money into the economy and pass bills that would hopefully save the economy, but it could be argued that the Federal Reserve did a better job during the Great Recession. During the end of both the Great Depression and Great Recession the economy slowly returned to its previous state, but we did not go to war after the Great Recession. There are disputable similarities and differences in the Great Depression and Great Recession, but the government did learn something from the governments past