The Recession In Perspective

Neat little tool from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Basically it allows you to compare various economic statistics for past recessions.

In terms of employment, it looks like the current recession is only trumped by the 1948, 1953, 1957 and the 1961 recessions. The recessions from the mid 1960's onward look pretty tame by comparison. I wonder what the fundamental difference between these two time periods could be. Perhaps it is a greater reliance on agriculture and manufacturing (goods production) or less action taken by the Fed in those early years. Maybe it was the removal of the gold standard in 1973 that allowed more freedom in dealing with monetary problems that made latter recessions milder by comparison. Who knows?

The somewhat disheartening thing is that most recessions have rebounded or flattened out by the 12th month or so. Just on the basis of employment, the current recession looks on par with the 1961 recession, which did not begin to recover until the 18th month.

I suppose the problem with this reasoning is that we don't know if we ended a recession yet, do we? I mean it took the NBER 12 months to announce that we were in a recession, we might be out of the woods already and not even know it.

Yeah, I am not convinced either.