The "Depression" Index

A thing the media likes to do is measure the occurrence of one word or another to see if it's likely to come true. The most common example of this is the "Recession Index" where the word recession tends to predict actual recessions. However, what is interesting is "depression" is being cited more in the media ("media" consisting of The New York Times, the WSJ and the London Times) than even during the Great Depression.



This is just one of what is now an increasing number of charts showing various things out of whack MORE than they were right before the Great Depression.

P/E Ratios.

Total debt.

Housing prices to rents, etc.

All currently at higher levels (or at least before the stock and housing markets started to tank anyway) than what they were before the Great Depression.

To this day what I cannot understand is with these figures how it took Wall Street, economists and various other finance professionals to take until 200-freaking-8 to predict a recession. I was almost angry that the economy didn't go into a recession in the first half of 2008, let alone 2007 which is when I was predicting the economy would (arguably as early as 2006, but I'd have to check my posts).

Regardless, nobody listens to poor Cappy. And only if Wall Street did, would they, along with the rest of America be avoiding this current financial crisis.