First a default, then a depression? Some think so

It wouldn’t only cause a depression or another Great Depression, but the Greatest Depression.

Thursday brought a change to that trend, though, as investors heeded a dire message from President Barack Obama, who intimated in a CNBC interview Wednesday that Wall Street was taking the crisis too lightly.

Consequently, stocks sold off sharply and the Treasury Department warned of the dire consequences that might result from a full-blown debt default.

Picking up on that message, Bove said the situation could be more dramatic: A Depression that would cause severe and lasting economic damage.

“The devastation to the United States would be so severe that it would take decades to recover from the Depression caused by a default and the attendant dumping of trillions of dollars of U.S. Treasury securities on the global financial markets,” said Bove, vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets.

Why You Will Be Blindsided By The Next Financial Crisis

“The global financial crisis that began in the United States in the summer of 2007 was triggered by a bank run, just like those of 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907 and 1933.”  That’s the theme of Yale economist Gary Gorton’s Misunderstanding Financial Crises, Why We Don’t See Them Coming, published last year by Oxford University Press. Students of financial crises will tell you that Gorton’s theme is highly relevant to the next meltdown we could face someday soon.