• by Joe Mandese , March 23, 2009

Paul Kedrosky, Editor, Infectious Greed, has some serious mind-numbing eye-charts in his OMMA Global presentation on the state of the economy. But it’s not the impossible to read data points that have me down. It’s the observations and conclusions he is drawing, and they ain’t good. And they’ve been brewing for some time. Probably since the Great Depression.

“What we’ve seen over the last seven years, is something that has been building over the last 60 years,” Kedrosky, said, showing slide illustrating the “massive” accumulation of debt over that time.

The big difference now from the Great Depression, is that back then, the debt ratio grew out of whack among “corporate,” Kedroksy said, adding that today, it is coming from consumers.

“This time, around, it wasn’t corporate so much. It has much more to do with households,” he noted, adding that the profound run-up, and the recent crash, is going to fundamentally change the way we think as consumers.

“It’s scarring our financial psyche,” he said, predicting it would change everything about how we handle our individual finances, and “how we approach spending and savings.”