President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a similar predicament in the 1930s when the possibility of a double-dip Depression loomed.
As a result, the US was pushed to the cusp of a double-dip depression, with manufacturing back to its 1934 level and unemployment up by 5%.
In the late 1930s, when we faced a double-dip depression, Marriner Eccles, the chairman of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Federal Reserve, worried that our mounting debts and real need for public investment would be hampered by a prevalent sentiment that "unwise spending seems to be spending for the other fellow".
I wanted to be there, and, failing, I developed instead a tendency to ascribe every dip and depression to the rape, organizing our shared life around it, carrying it forward into our future like a germ.
Davidson has found that emotionally stronger people, that is those who bounce back from bad news rather than dip into depression and anxiety, have stronger gamma wave connections between the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdalae.
Years ago, I met an owner of a small bank in the Midwest who said he dipped into depression and sleepless nights throughout what he called the "panic" during the crash of 1929.
"There are boulders, there are cracks and dips and depressions, but we don't really know what their mechanical properties are like.
And suggesting that other D words — dip, downturn, even depression — didn't sufficiently reflect reality, perhaps because they connote temporary fluctuations instead of an inexorable arc.
However, the long-term trend -- even in recent years -- has stuck close to a straight line, slanting upward, except for one big dip representing the great depression of the 1930s.
Three immediate trends stand out: a dip near the Great Depression, a dip near World War II, and a general upswing in the 1990's and 2000's.
