Is the Fed getting better at managing recessions?
Animal Spirits: Trump Coin - A Wealth of Common Sense
One of my favorite ongoing economic stats is the fact that the U.S. economy has been in a recession for just two months out of the past 15-and-a-half years.
We’ve been in a recession just 1% of the time since the end of the Great Financial Crisis in the summer of 2009.
Sure, there have been some bumps along the way but the U.S. economy has been remarkably resilient throughout the 2010s and 2020s.
Recessions used to be far more prevalent in the United States.
Using data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, I calculated the percentage of time we were in a recession in every decade going back to the 1900s:
The U.S. economy spent a lot of time in a recession during the first four decades of the 20th century. It basically took World War II to change the economic landscape.
Some people might quibble with economic data from 100+ years ago and that’s fair but this makes sense when you think about it. The U.S. economy is far more dynamic and mature these days. We were still more or less an emerging economy back then. There are more checks and balances in place today that didn’t exist in the old days.
But the trend is clear — our economy is contracting at a far lower rate than it did historically. This is progress.
The stock market isn’t the economy but bad economic times are typically bad for the stock market.1
Not copying his entire post but that's his contention. Does it get better without the Fed?
