Unemployment from the '29 stock crash increased from mid 5s to mid 9s. Smoot Hawley increased the Mid 9s to low 20s.
Right. A lot of people talk about the Depression, but they rely on what they learned in school, or civic myths about cause and effect.
Real unemployment in the US by the same measuring stick used in the Depression is at Depression levels. That's stone cold fact.
This is not a recession. Recessions have an end. They are the necessary correction phase for a period of unsustainable credit expansion.
The regulatory and debt environment in the US is such a long term drag on growth, that even once credit is destroyed, as much as it can be with the FED protecting bad debt, where are the jobs supposed to come from?
New businesses create almost all of the new net jobs. Businesses over 5 years old typically do not change their employment structure significantly as they have figured out an overhead model that works for them.
Personally, I think everything the FED does is malfeasance. There is no need for central economic planning with regards to interest rates comrades.
As Mises once wrote (paraphrasing), "Every intervention leads to the next crisis." And that is the history of central banking in the 20th and 21st centuries.