“Recession easing, but not over: survey.” This morning’s headline, as far as we can tell, only goes to prove that Mark Twain should be quoted far more often: “If you don’t read the paper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”

Does “stimulus” really work? Does quantitative easing work? The historical record suggests not. So what brought us out of the Great Depression? The answer might surprise, even though it shouldn’t…  A grumpy President Obama says that the $787 billion dollar stimulus package “has worked as intended.”

We are now in June 1930, according to trader/author Ron Coby, a friend and neighbor of one of our favorite underground investors Dan Ferris. (Ferris is a member of the Stansberry & Associates Investment Research team and editor of Extreme Value. ) Ron believes stocks are going to plunge – just as they did from June 1930 to July 1932 when the crash that began on October 24 1929 finally bottomed.

This is an eye-opener. Whenever I talk about the Great Depression and compare it with what is going on today, I get a lot of skepticism. I hear a lot of people say, definitively, “This isn’t as bad as the Great Depression.”

World trade experiencing a “huge drop”, according to the World Trade Organization.  Rather than the gloomy 9% predicted earlier this year, volume will likely contract by 10%.

It’s been in the news the last couple of days. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) bankers are headed for record bonuses. The Financial Times reports that bankers’ pay in the London market is already right back to 2007 levels and going higher. Banks are poaching each others’ best staff, and are offering huge pay packages to staffers willing to make the leap.

Plenty of punters and commentators thought things were getting better in 1929, too. And to prove it, one diligent blogger has started summarizing the news from the Wall Street Journal form the corresponding day in 1930 (one year after the crash – get it?).

This week’s Outside the box looks at some very interesting research done by two economic historians, Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley and Kevin O’Rourke of Trinity College, Dublin They give us comparisons between the Great Depression and today’s downturn.

When the Labor Department recently reported that U.S. payrolls fell by 345,000 jobs in May – the lowest total in eight months – commentators were suddenly spotting “green shoots” of economic recovery virtually everywhere they looked.

Is the hoped-for economic rebound merely a mirage? And if it is, how should you play it? For the past few months, optimistic analysts and investors have been scouring the global economy for so-called “green shoots” – a new financial buzzword that refers to any early indicators of a financial recovery.