With the housing crash still on going and the credit crunch getting worse instead of better, the comparisons between today's troubles and those of the Great Depression are becoming more and more numerous.

In fact, at this rate they are popping up in the media and on the web as quickly as the foreclosure notices themselves, which is no small feat.

The big question, of course, is whether or not these comparisons are accurate or whether they just make for good copy.

The problem though is that so much of what we know about the Great Depression is sketchy at best, lying somewhere between Black Tuesday and Smoot-Hawley.

But the fact is that the Great Depression was a 10 year episode with a number of causes that are still being argued about even to this day.

What does manage to stick out from the morass though are the statistics. And it's those numbers more than anything else that gives the slump its ultimate definition.

So are we really headed for another depression?

Well let's hope not, because the numbers from the first one are so off the charts that they are almost impossible to comprehend.

Consider these facts:

· From 1929 to 1933 production at the nation's factories, mines and utilities fell by 50%

· Real disposable income fell by 28%

· Stock prices fell by 90%

· The number of unemployed rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933.

· At its worst, 1 in 4 workers nationally were out of work.

· Auto production fell 75% from its 1929 peak.

· Nine thousand banks failed between 1930 and 1933.

And it was only after 10 years of stumbling and bumbling through that morass that the economy finally began to rebound for good. Hard to fathom isn't it?

So by comparison, at this point, just by looking at the numbers there really is none and it's beyond unlikely that there ever will be. A recession...probably. A depression...not a chance.

Nonetheless, there are certainly more than enough similarities in the events to make you wonder exactly what lies ahead.

Here are few those similarities.

They come to us courtesy of Marriner S. Eccles, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 1948.

In his 1951 memoir Beckoning Frontiers, Eccles detailed what he believed caused the Depression.

Eccles wrote:

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation s economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.] Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spending by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product -- in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups -- we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.

The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.

Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.

This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression."

Now does any of that sound familiar? You bet.

But, of course, ours is a story that is still being written.

And while that story may never include anything close to what happened in the 30's, you can't help but believe that some sort of reckoning is going to be found somewhere in the tale.