Is US recession drifting towards 1929's......period?

Well Friends,
I read an article somewhere and I am pasting some excerpts here.

Great Depression questions resurface amid current economic conditions, just as they have during other downturns
Fears resurface amid latest turmoil, as they have during previous downturns, but parallels are few and regulation has changed
Dysfunctional capital markets, frantic central banks, stressed-out consumers, fear and uncertainty—all are alarming echoes of the global economic cataclysm of the 1930s.Which raises the inevitable question: Could another Great Depression be lurking over the horizon?TV news programs show grainy footage of Depression-era bankers as reporters tick off grim economic statistics. The Federal Reserve invokes powers it hasn't used since the 1930s. Critics of President Bush's economic policies are emboldened to use the H-word: Hoover.
On the surface, there are disquieting parallels between economic conditions in the early 1930s and those of today. There is the popping of enormous asset bubbles: stocks then, housing now. And, as in the Great Depression, the financial system is in disarray. It was symbolized back then by the failure of thousands of banks, mostly small, local outfits—2,300 in 1931 alone.The parallel today is the crippling of onetime giants such as Bear Stearns Cos., Countrywide Financial Corp. and Ameriquest Mortgage Co.Many economists believe the U.S. will find it almost impossible to avert a recession, if one has not started already. Housing remains mired in a deep slump. The Commerce Department reported last week that new residential building permits nationwide plummeted 36.5 percent in February from a year earlier.Then, like now, stock prices were highly volatile. The Standard & Poor's 500 index, which fell more than 56 percent from 1928 through 1940,nevertheless recorded four up years in that span, including a 46.5 percent gain in 1933.The shadow of the '30s looms over every economic downturn or crisis, no matter how modest. Pundits were quick to invoke the Depression as a cautionary model during the stock market crash of 1987, the bailout of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the dot-com meltdown of 2000 and 2001.But there are vast differences between the 1930s and today. U.S. unemployment reached 25 percent during the Depression; last month, it was reported at 4.8 percent. The international industrial economy was a shambles in the '30s. Today, it is coming off a global boom."I've been asked many times whether we will have another Great Depression," said David M. Kennedy, a Stanford University history professor and the author of "Freedom From Fear," a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Depression and World War II. "My standard answer is that we won't have that one again. I'd be surprised to have one of that seriousness and duration. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a catastrophe we haven't seen before."Nothing demonstrates that as vividly as the Fed's orchestration of the takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The deal staved off a possible bankruptcy, which the central bank feared might traumatize financial systems worldwide.The resolution drew a stark contrast with the Fed's role in the 1930 collapse of the Bank of the United States, a New York institution largely serving Jewish immigrants. The failure was then the largest in U.S. history, and the Fed's inability to arrange a rescue by Wall Street banks, including J.P. Morgan & Co., the predecessor to the "white knight" in the Bear Stearns case, caused a cataclysmic loss of confidence in the entire national banking system. That fueled a panic that historians regard as a key cause of the Depression.The Fed's relative powerlessness in 1930 led directly to New Deal reforms that vastly expanded its authority. Some of the agency's new powers, such as its ability to lend directly to brokers and investment banks, were seldom or never used until the current crisis.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, an expert in the central bank's Depression-era history, is also knowledgeable about the instruments at its disposal in a crisis.In a 2002 speech, when he was a member of the central bank's board of governors under Alan Greenspan, he outlined a number of drastic steps the Fed could take in extreme conditions and still remain within its legal authority.Among them were buying up foreign government debt to influence dollar exchange rates, and even lending, if indirectly, against private assets.
The subject of Bernanke's speech was how to combat deflation, a broad decline in consumer prices that is not currently a problem on the Fed's agenda. Still, the powers he described could apply in a wide range of dire scenarios.
There are also limits to what monetary policy, the Fed's responsibility, can achieve on its own to forestall a drastic economic downturn. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration not only reformed the Fed but also experimented with stimulative fiscal policy, such as unemployment relief.
New Deal programs aimed at staving off a wave of home foreclosures might be especially relevant today. Among the most important was the Home Owners Loan Corp., or HOLC, which is one of several models for homeowner relief being considered by Congress.HOLC took over 1 million mortgages in default starting in 1933, worked to keep the owners in their homes and made new loans to strapped mortgage holders. When the agency was finally liquidated in 1951, it even returned a small profit to the U.S. Treasury.

My View:
If 1 million houses default were there in 1930's, while comparing the population, then in 1930's and now in 2008 in USA......then we can assume that 10 lacs housing loan defaults can be considered very very big.....While we compare this with the recent housing default crisis, it seems to me very very less then what happened in 1930's.
Hence I feel what Shankar Shrama spoke about the 1929 type scenario again visiting looks pity difficult to arrive....
I think Ben Branake is the BEST person at the helm of affairs and I am confident he will be able to aver the recession situation and bringing the US economy to a Slow down or on the brink of a longterm slow down.....I think US market should rally from the second half....means from June onwards.......