First, the pictures. Paul Swartz of the Council on Foreign Relations has a new version of his charts on the current recession in historical perspective, which I first linked to in June. The overall impression? We are still considerably worse off today than in other postwar recessions at this point (21 months in), although some indicators appear to be bottoming out.
Now the words. Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns has a guest post at naked capitalism presenting the arguments for a robust recovery and for no recovery at all. He cites Joseph Stiglitz for the proposition that statistical GDP growth isn’t everything, and extends the point to argue that you can have “low-quality” GDP growth if that growth is financed by debt without corresponding investment. When you happen to control the world’s reserve currency you can do this for quite some time, and there’s no saying we can’t do it for a while longer. So one possibility Harrison foresees is a reasonable growth fueled by cheap money, yet no change to some of our underlying economic problems, including a financial sector with a put option from the federal government.
By James Kwak