On Thursday's episode of "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer declared that the depression is, well, over. No stranger to making bold statements about the stock market and the economy, ">Cramer delivered the news in his own inimitable style, unequivocally stating with gusto: "Right now, right here on this show -- I am pronouncing the Depression over."

And who does he credit for this turn around? As he wrote on bloggingstocks.com the same day, the credit lies with Obama.

When [Obama] became more market-focused, and the Fed took rates to zero and offered financing -- leverage to buy asset-backs -- and took mortgage rates down to record lows while homes lost huge percentages of their value, the fire caught. Lending started again.


And the depression ended. I think it ended in the first week of March. I think that's what Doug Kass saw when he went bullish. I think I saw it when I realized that even if every financial went under and most companies cancelled their dividends, we only had 1,000 points to drop, and you had to start buying. There just wasn't enough downside left.

The level of debt in the United States today is higher than in the depression of the early 1930s. In 1929, the debt-to-GDP ratio was about 150%; by 1932, it had grown to 215%. In September 2008, the outstanding debt due on credit-default swaps - a Made-in-America product (and, it should be recalled, only one type of debt - was over 400% of GDP. In global terms, the value of debt in September 2008 was $160 trillion (three times global GDP), while the value of outstanding derivatives is an almost inconceivable $640 trillion (fourteen times the GDP of all countries in the world).Dollars and Sense