Quote from Random.Capital:
Agree on 1938, but my recollection of the 1970s is that they had both persistent growth in unemployment as well as credit contraction.
I'm really not trying to be redundant, but back in the 70's, while we had cyclical recessions, we didn't have a massive and permanent structural change to the U.S. economy like we have in the last decade or so. In the 70s, people at factories, tool and die and machine shops, etc., may have been laid off, but they were rehired when things picked back up. Now, their former factories closed down and are for sale, as Chinese and Mexican facilities have replaced them.
Construction booming hid the warts from about 2002 to 2007, as people laid off in other industries got jobs as carpenters, electricians, excavators, plumbers, realtors, mortgage brokers, bank loan officers, etc., but now that this has crashed, the warts and permanent destruction is quite visible.
In the 1930s, there was a light at the end of the tunnel: WWII, where we had more than full employment, as even women were building tanks and fighter planes and bombers, due to the shortage of male labor.
When the men got back after WWII, Japan, Germany, England, Russia, France, Italy - all decimated with factories blown to smithereens - America was the only center of production available, and we built everything, from cars to planes to TVs to washers and dryers and christmas tree lights, for a long, long time.