This year, October 22 will mark the 80th anniversary of the 1929 great depression. It was perhaps the most horrible thing to happen to the United States. And eighty years later, the nation is in agony with repercussion of another meltdown.

The great depression affected the world economy in many ways. Most countries suffered some sort of political turmoil, pushing them to the left or right. Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands; all were affected by the economic holocaust.

But there is certainly a marked difference between both the crises. The current recession didn't did not have much of an effect on industrial production while the 1929 depression affected industrial production severely.

The employment curve of this recession does not look comparable to that of the early Depression. The unemployment rate during the great depression touched 25 per cent, while this time; the unemployment rate is 8.5 per cent.

The cause of the Great Depression is still a matter of lively discussion among economists. Fiscal events during the Great Depression have been studied meticulously. Deflation in commodity prices, drop in demand and credit, and disruption of trade, ultimately resulted in pervasive poverty and joblessness.

The major causes of present economic meltdown are credit crunch, falling realty prices, inflation squeezing incomes and crumpling confidence of finance sector.

Countries began to recover by the mid-1930s and the depression ended by late 1930s or early 1940s. Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first of four presidential elections in 1932, while the US was in the pits of the depression.

But like how every cloud gas a sliver lining, great depression also had one. During that hard-time, U.S. life expectancy increased by 6.2 years. Population health by and large improved during the years.