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Is this shaping up as the next Great Depression? Please, say some local banking experts. This isn’t even the next 1980s.

Tom Stanberry, CEO of West Bank, brought some comparisons to our attention last week. It’s true that the ISM Manufacturing Index, which he monitors, has slumped to its lowest reading since 1982. That can’t be good. But look at what else was going on back then:

In February 1982, the federal funds target rate hit 15 percent. Now it’s 1 percent.

In 1982, the unemployment rate got close to 11 percent. Now it’s 6.5 percent.

In 1982, the 10-year Treasury note rate averaged 13 percent and several times approached 15 percent. Now it’s about 3.5 percent.

According to statistics compiled several years ago by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, more than 200 U.S. banks failed each year from 1987 through 1989. As of last week, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. listed on its Web site 20 banks that it has seized in 2008.

The national home foreclosure rate hit 1.3 percent at the end of 1987. The first quarter of 2008 saw one foreclosure filing per 194 households, or about 0.5 percent.

Such statistics go to support Stanberry’s larger point: that this recession is mostly fueled by fear, not forced upon us by the fundamentals. “What’s going on now is child’s play,” he said, compared with some of the woes Americans survived in the ’80s.

Stanberry, American State Bank of Osceola CEO Jim Schipper and Iowa Bankers Association President John Sorensen are making the rounds to report that the state’s community banks are sound and busily lending.

They also are contending that it’s better to remain optimistic than to issue self-fulfilling prophecies of doom all the time.

Of course, people in the news media tend to think that we always need to face the current facts.

Perhaps we should do a little of each.