The Great Depression of 2008? Not quite

By Robert MacMillan - Analysis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - There's something about hundreds of billions of dollars vanishing overnight that begs a comparison to the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression.

Almost -- but not yet.

The United States has seen the destruction of some of its biggest names in finance, thousands of lost jobs and threats to the stability of the world banking system. All in one week.

The losses are staggering, more than $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars pledged by the U.S. government to mop up bad mortgage debt and prop up the financial system. The final tab could be far greater.

To put it in perspective for Wall Street and the world outside, news outlets have latched onto the 1929 crash and the subsequent Great Depression as their historical benchmarks.

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a reporter at business news cable network CNBC, told viewers it was "one of the most historic weeks in financial and American history."

Hold on a minute, market veterans and scholars say. It's serious, because it has been preceded by a 13-month credit crisis that has gotten worse despite government efforts to solve it. But it has yet to reach the cataclysmic scale of the Depression.

"I've lived through plenty of debacles. Each time you go through it, it seems like the worst since 1929," said Theodore Weisberg, a New York Stock Exchange member for some 40 years.

"The nomenclature of the word 'crisis' has cheapened," said Roy Smith, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and former partner at Goldman Sachs (GS.N).

No one disputes that it is a profound crisis, but Depression-level may be overdoing it, said Allan Sloan, Washington Post and Fortune magazine columnist.

"I don't think so, considering that the Great Depression had thousands of banks failing and people losing their life savings, 25 percent unemployment and social unrest and tent cities of the poor," Sloan said.

BLACK MONDAY, TUESDAY, THURSDAY

Financial earthquakes that have prompted fearful murmurings of the bad old days include the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s and the dot-com bust early in this decade that wiped trillions of dollars of paper wealth off the Nasdaq market.

Then there was October 1987, when stock markets around the world crashed. History books are spotted with numerous references to Black Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

It is clear that the current financial meltdown that killed Lehman Brothers LEH.N(LEHMQ.PK), sold off Merrill Lynch MER.N and forced the U.S. government to take over insurance provider American International Group (AIG.N) could radically change nearly a century's worth of financial policy.