Our current global economic crisis is "vastly worse" than the dark days of the 1930s, says financial author Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Why? Because global economies are more interdependent than they were during The Great Depression, according to Taleb.

The stock market is inching upwards as of early May, job losses declining and the government is pumping billions into the economy, but Taleb sees no imminent recovery.

Speaking recently before a Bank of America-Merrill Lynch conference in Singapore, Taleb said: "This is the most difficult period of humanity that we're going through today because governments have no control."

Excerpts from Taleb's address were published in Bloomberg News.

Taleb is a former options trader and analyst, and currently a professor of risk engineering at New York University, who wrote in his 2007 book, "We have never lived before under the threat of global collapse."

Increasingly, over the past years, global markets in many categories — equities, bonds, commodities, currencies and others — have been moving in tandem, confirming Taleb's gloomy contention.

The International Monetary Fund agrees with Taleb. It recently downgraded its world economic growth forecasts and said the global recession will deepen and will not soon stabilize.

Yet while the U.S. economy fell during the first quarter at a 6.1 percent annual rate, contributing to the deepest recession in 50 years, Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke remains optimistic.

He recently told Congress that he expects the economy "to bottom out, then to turn up later this year."