Depression 2009: What would it look like?

An article that offers a rather fanciful envisioning of a possible economic and financial future for us all...

"Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals. Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that's not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that. What, then, would we see instead? And how would we even know a depression had started? It's not a topic that professional observers of the economy study much. And there's no single answer, because there's no one way a depression might unfold. But it's nonetheless an important question to consider - there's no way to make informed decisions about the present without understanding, in some detail, the worst-case scenario about the future. By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it's possible to envision what we might face."

Read the entire article here.

I enjoy reading articles such as this one, whether time proves them to be correct or incorrect, because they satisfy my unending sense of wonder about the future.
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist