- The Oil Crisis from 11 January 1973 to 3 October 1974.
- This is the dot-com crash, which lasted from 24 March 2000 to 9 October 2002.
- The Crash of '29 and the Great Depression, from 3 September 1929 to 8 July 1932.
- The collapse of the current credit bubble, from 9 October 2007 until an as yet undetermined date in the future.
As we can see, We followed the path faithfully towards the elephant graveyard of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Furthermore, the chart below shows that the current price of the S&P 500 has already fallen back to levels last seen 12 years ago.
But worst of all is that the current situation in the US is one of deep recession, as we can see from the following chart:
It shows the number of US states experiencing economic growth. In other words, virtually all states are in recession. Obviously, the rest of the Western world will follow the lead of the American economy, and against this backdrop of deep depression, the foreseeable trend indicated by the first two charts in this article is chilling. And we must not forget this exercise in analysing the economic environment, as it is very different to analyse current and future macroeconomic figures and forecasts for a foreseeable scenario expansive than for one person depressive.
We have all been born and raised in an environment of economic expansion, with its downturns, but expansionary nonetheless. Not even our parents and grandparents lived through essentially recessionary economies (except for the 1930s, which ended with the outbreak of war). We must therefore make a special effort to analyse the present and the future without forgetting that the breeding ground – the world before us – is unknown Apache territory which will severely hamper the known prospects of recovery.