So much for those “green shoots”, say two economic historians, Barry Eichengreen at the University of California at Berkley and Kevin O'Rourke of Trinity College, Dublin. “Globally, we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression … Focusing on the US causes one to minimize this alarming fact,” writes John Mauldin in one of his weekly investment letters, summarizing their research. Despite a three month rally in U.S. equity markets, and a smaller decline in U.S. manufacturing production relative to the Great Depression, the global economy is as bad as or worse than it was during the Great Depression, say the researchers. That bodes poorly for a recovery, they say. Indeed, both global stock markets and global trade are falling even faster than they did some 80 years ago, say Eichengreen and O'Rourke. Industrial output in Germany and the U.K. are declining at a rate similar to that of the 1930s; in Italy and France they have fallen off even more dramatically; in Japan, as of February, industrial output was off 25 percent more than it was at the same stage during the Great Depression. We may have a long way to go.
