I am asked pretty regularly these days if I think that the current financial crisis is going to become another Great Depression. Being a historian with a decent grasp of that time, I usually say the honest thing: I have no idea.

But the fundamentals surely don't look good, and a mismanaged country that has witlessly off-shored manufacturing jobs for close to two decades and failed to deliver increases in real incomes in a quarter century all the while witnessing the rise of an excessively rich overclass atop a financial sector that has collapsed shouldn't be overly optimistic about it being morning again in America in the morning.

Here is a historian, John Paul Rossi, who argues quite clearly that the makings of a depression are in place.

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