>
> http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3071
>
> ...This recession is different. The rise in inflows
> has been unparalleled. Not only has the rate of
> inflow already risen by more than any other recession,
> but it's been on an unbroken rising streak for a much
> longer period of time, and there's no sign of a
> reduction yet...
The other day I was messing with BLS text files and I came up with this:
http://uncharted.org/frownland/pix/recession3.jpg
which indicates (to me, anyway) that the '74 recession was sharper than the current one.
The idea with the "relative" and "absolute" curves is that when Pelosi whipped out the original chart
http://uncharted.org/frownland/pix/joblosses26091.gif
the other day, which showed job losses in the 1990 (dark blue) and 2001 (dark red) recessions as compared with the current slump (green), some critics said "but the population was smaller in 1990, so the same number of job losses translates into a larger percentage loss in employment back then." So I hunted down the BLS series her staff used to compose that graph, and scaled the lines for job losses proportionate to the difference in the total number of people employed at the peak. In other words, as there were 24% more workers in 12/07, the most recent peak, than in 5/91, the peak before the '91 slump, I scaled the 1991 line vertically by 1.24. So you can compare the light-colored lines to see job losses in each recession as a percentage of the peak employment immediately prior to that recession. I also added the '74 and '82 recessions to the graph.
At any rate, the '74 jolt appears quite a bit steeper and sharper than the current avalanche. Of course, we're 13 months into this one and job numbers are still falling like a rock off a cliff, whereas in '74 by month 13 the job losses were half recovered already.
I don't know if it makes sense to compare the progress of these various recessions, though. If I remember right (and considering the dubious recreational habits I pursued that year, I may not), the '74 slump got fired off by one single outside event; that gol' durn Assholah of an Ayatollah done shut off our oil tap, which suddenly turned filling up my Chevelle SS396 from merely a bummer into an out-and-out ass-whippin'.
In contrast, as I understand it, the '82 and '91 recessions were not the fault of dark malicious foreigners, but were actually engineered recessions, courtesy of that fucking prick Greenspan and the Fed. The Fed ran the prime rate up specifically and explicitly to increase unemployment as an anti-inflationary measure to bail out bond holders. Recovery came only when the bond-holders were happy; the Fed controlled the depth and duration of those recessions like a virtuoso playing a violin.
Then the '02 and '08 recessions were caused by something yet different and far less controllable by bankers's manipulations; in '02, the collapse of the tech bubble, and in '08, the collapse of the mortgage bubble.
So those colored trend lines might not actually be all that comparable.
That's my ill-informed take on it, and I would like to read what people who actually know something about economics and recent economic history have to say about these notions.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at gmail.com
