There’s no doubt that we’re in a rough housing market right now: there are a lot of houses for sale, many of which are in foreclosure, and not enough qualified buyers to buy them. But are we in a recession or, worse: Is the economy heading towards a return to the Great Depression?

Not exactly, say experts in a recent article at Reuters:

“Hold on a minute, market veterans and scholars say. It’s serious, because it has been preceded by a 13-month credit crisis that has gotten worse despite government efforts to solve it. But it has yet to reach the cataclysmic scale of the Depression.

‘I’ve lived through plenty of debacles. Each time you go through it, it seems like the worst since 1929,’ said Theodore Weisberg, a New York Stock Exchange member for some 40 years.

‘The nomenclature of the word “crisis” has cheapened,’ said Roy Smith, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and former partner at Goldman Sachs. 

No one disputes that it is a profound crisis, but Depression-level may be overdoing it, said Allan Sloan, Washington Post and Fortune magazine columnist. 

‘I don’t think so, considering that the Great Depression had thousands of banks failing and people losing their life savings, 25 percent unemployment and social unrest and tent cities of the poor,’ Sloan said.”

Source: Reuters