Dallas Fed's Fisher says current crunch worse than S&L crisis

There's an interesting report out this afternoon from the Dallas Morning News. The paper interviewed Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed. In the article, Fisher characterized the current credit collapse as worse than the Savings & Loan Crisis. That's a bold statement (so I put it in bold -- clever, huh?). More from the story below:

"The U.S. economy faces “a sustained period of anemia,” said Richard W. Fisher, president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, in comments Tuesday to The Dallas Morning News.

“I expect that in the second half of this year we will broach zero growth,” he said. “The word recession means nothing to me. The important thing is we’re not doing as well as we could.”

"Despite the sluggish outlook for the U.S. economy as a whole, Texas remains a bastion of relative economic strength, Mr. Fisher said. The state’s economy has slowed somewhat compared to last year, but it continues to add jobs while the national economy is losing them.

“The benefit of being in Texas is we will have positive employment growth, somewhere in between 1.5 percent and 2 percent,” he said. “We’re the one shining star in the United States.”

"Nationally, however, one source of continued economic weakness is the credit crunch that began last year, as lenders have become much more cautious after a credit binge earlier this decade.

“This is bigger than the S&L [crisis]. It’s broader. It’s deeper,” Mr. Fisher said. “We go through these periods of correction. It’s not unhealthy. It’s the way capitalism works.”