Part 2/12:
The current economic turmoil, while serious, is difficult to contextualize against past crises such as the Great Depression. The speaker emphasizes that this situation is unique. No previous government in peacetime has borrowed as aggressively from seemingly thin air or undertaken such deliberate measures to dismantle entire industries and labor markets. Unlike past downturns, which often resulted from financial shocks or speculative bubbles, this crisis has been largely engineered and masked through financial interventions that keep the economy afloat, masking underlying vulnerabilities.