[lbo-talk] it's over - now the destruction really begins

[Doug Henwood]

This conversation made me look up the economic stats to see how the  
major powers fared during the 1930s. Here are the changes in GDP  
(total, not annualized) for some major players, from the 1929 peak to  
the crash low followed by the recovery/expansion into 1939:

                Germany    Italy     Japan       UK        US

1929 to low    -23.5%     -3.1%     -7.3%     -5.8%    -28.5%

   year of low   1932      1933      1930      1931      1933
low to 1939    +79.1%    +27.3%    +71.5%    +26.9%    +43.2%

So, the depression was deepest and longest in the U.S. and Germany.  
Italy, Japan, and the UK got off fairly lightly. Germany and Japan had  
the strongest recoveries - a function, no doubt, of fascist  
Keynesianism. I can't say that this clarifies the relation, if any,  
between depression and world war.

Doug