Deffeyes: The Second Great Depression

On February 10, 2009 The Independent in the UK reported on a speech given by The Right Honorable Ed Balls, who has what it takes to use the word “depression.”

He warned that events worldwide were moving at a “speed, pace and ferocity which none of us have seen before” and banks were losing cash on a “scale that nobody believed possible”.

The minister stunned his audience at a Labour conference in Yorkshire by forecasting that times could be tougher than in the depression of the 1930s, when male unemployment in some cities reached 70 per cent. He also appeared to hint that the recession could play into the hands of the far right.

“The economy is going to define our politics in this region and in Britain in the next year, the next five years, the next 10 and even the next 15 years,” Mr Balls said. “These are seismic events that are going to change the political landscape. I think this is a financial crisis more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s, and we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy.”

Uh oh . . . somewhere out there, an author may be writing the successor to Mein Kampf. He (or she) might be in a cheap coffeehouse at a dark corner table hunched over a stolen laptop. (Women are not excluded, the great expansion of the British Empire happened under Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria. Indira Ghandhi, Golda Meyer, and Joan of Arc led their nations into war.)

Hubbert’s Peak