The most important issue before the American people right now is to overcome this crisis, said the president. What our people need is the restoration of their normal jobs they need help in the meantime to tide them over until these things can be accomplished and that they may not go hungry nor lose their farms and their homes.

Although the language might sound familiar, that wasn t President Obama, but Herbert Hoover, who, in a 1932 speech given three years after the stock market peaked and crashed, blamed obstructionist Democrats for delaying recovery.

Like our current leadership, Hoover pushed a battery of public works projects, government-secured loans, foreclosure reduction efforts, and higher taxes to bolster the economy.

As we pointed out last month, infrastructure expanded federal spending from 3.4% of GDP in 1930 to 9.8% in 1940. Hoover created a special committee on unemployment and Roosevelt pushed the WPA, yet unemployment still rose from 5% to over 20% by the end of the decade. The stock market wouldn t eclipse its 1929 high for 25 years.

Dow Jones Industrial Average 1929 - 1950

Source: Bloomberg, Oh Yeah? by Edward Angly

Nearly three years after our own stock market peak and plummet, government is again trying to overcome a crisis by intervening to keep people in their homes and in a job. We re creating new health-care entitlements. And while I m delighted to see the equity market having climbed to a new multimonth high, it s not just the similarities to Hoover s policies that should prompt concern, but the accompanying swagger.

It is largely thanks to the recovery act that a second depression is no longer a possibility," the president told reporters last month, an assertion eerily similar to that of Hoover s labor secretary, who promised in 1930 that The worst is over without a doubt and that we have hit bottom and are on the upswing.

The stock market didn t return to the level it was then trading for another 20 years.