Again, from the Washington Post:

January 2009 had the worst of circumstances — a once-in-a-lifetime economic emergency during a presidential transition.

Reinhart, for one, thinks the Bush and Obama administrations don’t get sufficient credit for all they did.

“The initial policy of monetary and fiscal stimulus really made a huge difference,” she says. “I would tattoo that on my forehead. The output decline we had was peanuts compared to the output decline we would otherwise have had in a crisis like this. That isn’t fully appreciated.”

In that way, Reinhart says, this time really was different — at least from the Great Depression, when output shrank by 30 percent and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. “If the choice was this or the ’30s,” she says, “I’d take this hands down.”

The original article is long, but worth reading and digesting.