20 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Meta Econ Takeover Day 19 meta
I made this post partly out of laziness, but also because my mom was asking me what I thought about it. She had read something about how "everyone" is expecting a recession in the spring. My first thought was that if that's true, we're going to get a recession before then. My second thought was that we've been in a recession for a while and they keep changing definitions and fixing the metrics.
Food for thought: Did we ever get out of the recession of 2008 or did we just paper over consistently declining real GDP (if calculated correctly with real inflation numbers) for the past 15 years?
Caveat- I am sure there were positive quarters and maybe even years.
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Some people like to differentiate between depressions and recessions, even though historically they're used pretty interchangeably.
If you think of a depression as a prolonged period of reduced standard of living (I think that's how Doug Casey puts it), then it might be reasonable to think of us being almost 16 years into a depression. That's basically how we talk about the Great Depression, which had several years of high, but fleeting, GDP growth.
Recessions tie more into business cycle theory (in my mind, at least) and refer to the undoing of resource misallocations. I think it's fair to say that the later Obama years into the early Trump years were a new bubble that burst at the start of Covid. That's actually where I date the start of this recession. They often end up being back dated, but not by that much.
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Agree. I think that is a better way of looking at it. Maybe even just stagnation. Money supply is consistently growing but it isn't flowing into increased production because the debt burden is so significant you need more and more capital injection to move the productivity needle.
People also get fat and happy, think they are rich as asset prices inflate, and don't work as hard which impairs the productivity side of things. (not that I am faulting people for this natural human reaction. I am one of them. Had a bunch of valuable assets that I was able to sell or leverage that allowed me to stop working 60-70 hours a week and to pretty much just work when I want)
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