Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, a terrific history of the Depression, brings a reminder of forgotten recent history as well, as she deflates so much recent economic doomsaying:

The gloom is so thick that it feels positively German. And that’s just our domestic press. The Brits have long since decided that doom is around the American corner. Covering Bear Stearns Cos., a reporter from the Independent wrote, “Wall Street traders said they had never experienced such fear.”

The suggestion behind such talk is that the current situation isn’t merely depressing. It is that the slowdown is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. You almost expect Senators Obama and Clinton to repeat the lines from President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of 75 years ago: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The analogy is absurd. This economy is to the Great Depression what an April drizzle is to Hurricane Katrina. So far, the Dow has declined about 12% from its record high of last fall. In the Depression, it dropped more than 80%. Unemployment is about 5%. In the Depression it was 25%.

Maybe 2% of mortgages are in trouble, and abandoned homes line some parts of Cleveland Heights. During the Depression, more than half of Cleveland was underwater. Today, one big bank has collapsed. In 1931, 1,400 banks collapsed.

Even a comparison with more recent periods is a stretch.

Today, everyone is concerned about the consequences of the Bear Stearns rescue. On the right, critics argue that the Federal Reserve’s decision to make funds available to Bear created moral hazard on a scale that can bring down our markets. These critics forget that in 1984 Washington actually nationalized a big bank. That bank was the nation’s seventh largest, Continental Illinois. Yet the Reagan Revolution didn’t stall.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Dow languished in the 800s for a period longer than it takes to collect a college degree. Unemployment in 1982 was close to 10%. Yet you didn’t hear too much talk about the New Deal or FDR’s speeches.

No--and FDR was smart enough not to suggest that a malaise had come over the nation, but you did hear his 1970s' would-be equivalent use very New Dealer-ish language when he equated reduction of foreign energy reliance with "the moral equivalent of war". And Business Week's infamous "Death Of Equities" cover in 1979 certainly had a Depression-era ring to it--only a year or two before the Dow began its rise to its current high of near 13,000.

More Shlaes:

So why so dark this time?

One reason is that last year and the year before felt so bubbly. As John Lipsky, then of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said, the market was so confident that “the only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself.”

Another reason for the current gloom is U.S. susceptibility to foreign wisdom. Americans tend to believe that if the Brits say something and it’s reported on Drudgereport.com, it must be so. But the Great Britain press derives some pleasure in seeing misfortune in America, and often hypes that misfortune.

Yet another problem is our addiction to Markets TV, which bears more similarity than any of us like to acknowledge to the Weather Channel. Lacking a truly dramatic winter to report, the anchors will yap about wind chill. Hear enough about wind chill, and eventually you begin to believe in it.

The most important reason for the current mood is demography. Our trouble isn’t that we have it so bad. It is that we have had it so good. Anyone who graduated college after that early 1980s’ snap hasn’t seen the Dow do much but go up.

That last point is debatable--16 years ago, another Democratic presidential nominee was also able to make great strides by transforming a temporary pause in the Dow's ascension into The Worst Economy Of 50 Years--which miraculously righted its course the very minute in November of 1992 he won the election.