The 2008 crisis really did start off worse than the Great Depression

``As economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke have shown, global stocks, trade and output actually all fell faster in 2008 than they had in 1929. Maybe the best example, though, of how quickly things turned was that South Korea, which didn't have any exposure to subprime mortgages but did have banks that depended on borrowing the money they needed from markets, went from growing at a 3.5 percent pace right before the Lehman Bros. collapse to shrinking at a 12.7 percent pace right after.''

This is really fascinating. The debate is between those who believe "policymakers deserve credit for doing enough to stop this from turning into a Second Great Depression", and "those who say policymakers didn't do enough to stop this from being far worse than it needed to be." There is apparently no space for those who think policymakers did too much, or even that they screwed up royally in creating the conditions for the collapse in the first place. Be afraid.