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A recession:
It's already as deep in the unemployment metric as the 1980 recession. IIRC, back then Marty Feldstein led the Business Cycle Dating Committee and called the recession before the 1980 election.
It will be interesting to see what Bob Hall's BCDC does this time...
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"I now know it is a rising, not a setting, sun" --Benjamin Franklin, 1787
J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major.
Among his best works are: "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare," "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style," "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression," "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy," "Productivity Growth in the 2000s," "Asset Returns and Economic Growth."
The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities is now strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.
" It will be interesting to see what Bob Hall's BCDC does this time... "
This is a rhetorical question, right?
Posted by: allan_in_upstate | September 05, 2008 at 08:32 AM
Can you tell us all what you mean by "deep in the unemployment metric?"
[A recession is not a time when unemployment is high, but a time when the unemployment rate is rising rapidly...]
Because, according to the graph, the unemployment number was far higher in the late seventies. I recall reading some discussions on how these measures change over time, and why it's misleading to compare 1980 numbers to 2008 numbers, but I don't remember the argument. Do you have a simple answer to why 6% unemployment now is really worse than the 9-10% unemployment figures of yesteryear?
I'd appreciate being taken to school on this one!
Posted by: br | September 05, 2008 at 09:43 AM
Surely you mean "ECONOMY PRESIDENT FAIL"?
Posted by: Alex | September 05, 2008 at 10:25 AM
Wasn't the Captain the last to know when the Titanic hit the iceberg?
Now that the economists know, it is only a matter of months before George Bush catches up with the news.
(BR: as I remember, unemployment grew substantially worse by '82-'83, but the recession was called in '80. Those were the years I did bankruptcy accounting, lots of it. Course the record prime rate and record inflation rates were an aggravating factor we do not have here...)
Posted by: save_the_rustbelt | September 05, 2008 at 11:30 AM
Ahh, the early 80's and Paul Volker's twin recessions. Killing that inflation. What a great time to be getting out of school and joining the labor market. Personally, I've always thought it was one long recession and that they defined them into 2 recessions so no one would call it a depression.
Posted by: Frank the sales forecaster | September 05, 2008 at 11:40 AM