By Vanessa Drucker, Fund Strategy
It must be the most hackneyed hyperbole of 2008. The phrase punctuates every financial article, while photos of breadlines hint at a dire future. Just try Googling "Not since the Great Depression" and you will strike gold. But, says Jim Grant, the editor of the trenchant Grant's Interest Rate Observer: "Those glib comparisons ignore the reality of the economic backdrops. In the thirties, nominal GDP was sawed in half, while today it is down less than a percentage point."
I ran into Grant at the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street, which houses a diverting collection of financial artefacts...