Greece leaving the eurozone and adopting its own currency would be associated with default in its government debt, a collapse of the Greek banking system, and would probably tip the Greek economy into depression.
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Governments are fighting to save their economies from a liquidity trap in which individual banks choose, rationally, to shore up their capital by withdrawing loans from healthy firms and households, but collectively tip the economy into depression.
The longstanding two major parties (again, a kind of faux left and right), having both endorsed the workout with the European Union that has thrown the Greek economy into depression, got barely a third of the total parliamentary vote.
While President Obama was in the Oval Office, making the toughest calls any president has had to make -- how to save the economy from depression, rescue the American auto industry, bring affordable health care to millions of Americans or take out Osama bin Laden -- Paul Ryan was in a different room.
The Wall Street Crash was a product of an economy in deep depression - so governments work hard to prevent such problems happening again.
And together, we saved the world economy from a depression.
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In the U.S., massive government bailouts and record deficit spending prevented the bursting of the housing bubble and resulting 2008 financial crisis from dropping the economy into Great Depression II.
Republicans blocked that because they want to water down Wall Street reforms, reforms that were put in place to help prevent the kind of financial crisis that almost tipped the global economy into a depression.
So both the Bush and Obama administrations determined that whatever it took in the way of stimulus and government spending to try to rescue the economy from another Depression would be better than the alternative if efforts were insufficient.
Or to put it another way, this general and widespread sense that the UK's aggregate debts have become too great has been the great dampener on the economy: it is what has kept Britain in a technical depression, with the economy limping along and the overall level of GDP still well below the peak of early 2008.
Both trends are likely to endure and grow in almost any economy short of Great Depression.
The stimulus may have prevented the global economy from slipping into depression.
So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.
We already saw that there was a financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a great depression -- the worst that we've seen in generations.
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Together, we passed Wall Street reform, to protect consumers in our financial system and put an end to taxpayer bailouts and stop the abuses that almost dragged our economy into another Great Depression.
These folks know, as every living soul in America does, that these have been a rough couple of years for our economy and for our country -- the deepest downturn since the Great Depression ripped through our economy, costing more than 8 million jobs and rocking businesses, large and small.
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That's a longer recovery period than the UK economy faced in the 1930s Depression.
The idea was to jumpstart lending and keep our economy from spiraling into a depression.
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That is when irrational exuberance turns into depression and the economy falls into a severe recession.
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This is an especially interesting year as the stock market and economy were recovering from the depression.
The European economic crisis has unfolded most dramatically in Greece, where the economy has plunged into a depression.
This financial crisis nearly pulled the entire economy into a second Great Depression.
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And we were on the verge of a financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a second Great Depression.
This economy can push people into depression and mental illness, she said, and she wants people to know they're not alone.
While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy's relapse in 1937.
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President Obama is claiming both that the deficits saved the economy from the brink of depression and that the deficits were Bush's fault.
Over the past two years, those of us in the G20 have worked together to rescue the global economy, to avert another depression, and to put us on the path to recovery.
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My hope is that the people who are running our economy do look to the Great Depression as an object lesson.
WSJ: Arthur B. Laffer: Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles
This staved off an immediate banking collapse, but enraged middle-class depositors, and drained the economy of liquidity, worsening a depression that has already lasted almost four years.
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