1933: Automotive workers in Detroit lining up to cash their checks. 2014: People entering an employment agency in an Athens suburb. The New York Times; Yorgos Karahalis/Reuter
The economy has been in disarray. People have been out of work for years. The banks have been running out of money. It sounds a lot like the Great Depression in the United States. But it is Greece – and in some ways, the situation is worse.
“Greece is in its own Great Depression. But unlike the United States, it won't be able to get back on its feet as quickly,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Greece “is shackled by onerous rules and regulations, an aging population and a dysfunctional domestic political system,” he added, and the country is “sharing important elements of sovereignty with its own creditors.”
An Economic Crisis
Government spending helped pull the United States out of the Great Depression starting in 1933, and decoupling the dollar from gold helped. Though the economy slipped back into recession in 1937, the onset of World War II and furious military spending helped the country recover for good.
Greece hasn’t had its own currency since it joined the euro, and an inefficient bureaucracy has long failed to improve tax collection or to trim its bloated government. At this point, Greece is just struggling to pay its bills, as it tries to secure aid from Europe.
Greece hasn’t had its own currency since it joined the euro, and an inefficient bureaucracy has long failed to improve tax collection or to trim its bloated government. At this point, Greece is just struggling to pay its bills, as it tries to secure aid from Europe.
1937: Jean Schwartz, a dress finisher, filled out an application for unemployment insurance in New York. John Lindsay/Associated Press
2015: A man begging on the street near a shipyard in the town of Perama. The area has a 90 percent unemployment rate. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Wary Job-Seekers
The American government helped bolster the employment market in the 1930s, by pouring billions of dollars into public jobs. Amid a bleak financial picture, unemployment in Greece remains extremely high, with more than a quarter of job-seekers unemployed and youth joblessness now topping 50 percent.
1929: The scene on Wall Street after the stock market crash Hulton Archive/Getty Images
2015: A display of falling stock prices at the exchange in Athens. Petros Giannakouris/Associated Press
Shaky Stocks
After losing billions of dollars on Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, the market spiraled. A few years later, the market began to bounce back. The volatility in Greece, which began during the global financial crisis in 2008, continues, as investors remain wary of the country’s prospects.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; Eurostat; U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research; Bloomberg
http://www.nytimes.com
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