Comparing recessions

Here are links to some excellent charts and data comparing this recession to previous ones. Included are comparisons to pre-WWII as well as post-WWII, because it's becoming increasingly evident that this recession has few, if any, post-war parallels.

As Brad Setser says, "Goodbye Great Moderation"

And as Simon Johnson muses, it increasingly looks like we're in an age of financial system distress and disfunction more like the days before the Depression - the post-Civil War era when economic volatility was rampant and recessions lasted for near-decades...

• Here's data from Paul Swartz at the Center on Foreign Relations. Charts cover both post-war and (some) pre-war data sets: how current US downturn stacks up against the typical post-War War 2 downturn.
• Here's some commentary on those charts from Mr Setser: Charting the current US downturn
• Here's some discussion/debate and a chart or two from Simon Johnson: Is It A V?
• And here's some raw data from NBER on business cycle expansions and contractions going all the way back to 1857: http://www.nber.org/cycles.html

By most measures, save employment compared to 1982, this puppy is the ugliest since the Depression. And I'd bet that before it's over the employment scene will indeed be worse than the early 1980s. And there are a few data points - export collapse, industrial production decline, equity market crash - that look a whole lot like the Depression.

The good news is that all agree that, thus far, government response has been much better than in the 1930s...