Depression Then and Now: Three Eye-Opening Charts

"Planet Earth is probably the riskiest it has been since the day before the meteor landed in the Yucatan and wiped out most life." ― Donald Coxe

This is an eye-opener. Whenever I talk about the Great Depression and compare it with what is going on today, I get a lot of skepticism. I hear a lot of people say, definitively, "This isn't as bad as the Great Depression."

What you have to remember, though, is the Great Depression unfolded like a train wreck in slow motion. It took awhile before it became the Great Depression. It wasn't like someone flipped a switch and poof! ― bread lines, Hoovervilles and hobos.

Another point to remember is that the Great Depression was a global economic event. It wasn't just confined to the U.S. You have a take a wide-angle view of the global economy to get a better sense of the breadth of the slump. And so it is today.

Take a look at the next few charts, from economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke. The first plots world industrial output from June 1929 against industrial output from April 2008:

We're tracking that path pretty closely.

Then there are world stock markets:

We're actually worse off right now.

Finally, take a look at the volume of world trade:

Again, here we're actually ahead of the pace set in the Great Depression.

There are several other charts, but I think you get the point. Eichengreen and O'Rourke conclude:

"To summarize: The world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the U.S. leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30."

Even so, there are many differences between now and then. One big difference that doesn't get much play is the fact that today we have large emerging economies such as China, India, Russia and Brazil.

Investment strategist Murray Stahl, in a recent letter, pointed out "the most important difference between that era and this era, which is the robust economic development of China, India, Russia and Brazil. During the Great Depression, those nations were in the opposite condition."

China was in the midst of a civil war and then had to fend off a Japanese invasion. India wasn't even on the economic map as anything of any consequence. Russia was backward and militantly communist. And Brazil had all kinds of political problems, including trying to put down a communist movement.

Today, those four countries are in much better shape. They are much larger and are still growing.

There are many more differences, and I don't expect what we're going through to play out like the Great Depression, except maybe in some of the broadest outlines. This is, or will be, known as the greatest crisis the world has faced since the Great Depression.

How it is similar is also in some of the valuations in individual top stocks to buy and securities. As Stahl writes, we share with the Great Depression the "bizarre valuations on highly liquid securities in the world capital markets [such] that I have never before seen in my 30-plus years of investment practice." In that, there is opportunity.

As I've written before, I think there is room for investing even in a weak economy. There are lessons we can learn from the Great Depression. Some top stocks for 2010 will do better than others. I expect the needed commodities that fuel those big emerging economies will be good places to be.

And these hard assets also provide some protection in a world where paper currencies are not likely to hold their value as cash-strapped governments around the world crank up the printing presses.