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Neil Irwin at the New York Times (The Upshot) writes that “no one cares about economic data anymore” which he says is “good news.” He points to some indisputable facts, such as the steady growth in both employment and GDP over the past few years. His focus is mostly on short-run monthly or quarterly movements in economic …
If you must know only one fact about the U.S. economy, it should be this chart: The chart shows that productivity, or output per hour of work, has quadrupled since 1947 in the United States. This is a spectacular achievement by an advanced economy. The gains in productivity were quite widely shared from 1947 to …
Economists of all stripes are baffled by continued economic weakness in the United States. The easiest way to see the weakness is to compare where we are in terms of GDP today relative to historical trend growth, something we did in a previous post. It is clear that one of the main drivers of this weakness …
A strong 2014Q2 GDP report came out today, registering in at 4% annualized real GDP growth. This is good news and could mean that soon Americans will have more means for reducing debt burdens, but it is worth looking at it in the context of the full recovery. Much of the recovery data was also …
A month ago, we compared the recovery from the Great Recession to the recovery after every recession since 1950. It looked pretty bad. Real GDP growth for 2014q1 was revised downward today to -3.0% on an annualized basis. Yes, our reading of Table 1.1.3 of NIPA shows -3.0%, not -2.9%. Here is real GDP indexed to the …
A concern that we highlighted in yesterday’s post is that the only way the U.S. economy can generate significant consumer spending is through aggressive lending to borrowers with low credit scores, eventually wrecking their credit and forcing them to struggle to repair their credit. Here is more evidence supporting that view. In the chart below, we plot …
Census retail sales for May came out today, and they missed the consensus forecast slightly on the downside. But there is another pattern that may be more concerning. Let’s take a closer look at what has been going on with household spending. First, new auto purchases have been an important driver of household spending for …
It seems crazy to have such a heated debate on facts that are so easily measurable. Here we use the SCF from 1992 to 2010 to show the pretty unambiguous rise in wealth inequality in the United States. The housing boom hid the rise in inequality to some degree, but the crash in house prices …
The central argument we make in our book is that the housing bust in combination with excessive household debt burdens were the key drivers of the economic downturn. Failure to more adequately address the housing disaster was the greatest policy mistake made in the Great Recession. One way to see the scars of the housing bust is …
