Hawkeye wrote: ↑Thu Jul 14, 2022 1:46 pm
I doubt he's nearly as stressed about how far he can raise rates under a Democrat without throwing us into a recession.
That's a pretty safe statement given we've already been in a recession for over a month now. One can never underestimate how quickly bad economic policy can bring down an economy.
CFR on the claim that we've been in a recession for over a month. Humpty Dumpty claims don't count.
Both the war in Ukraine and the COVID pandemic are going to continue to destabilize the global economy for some time to come. Instability leads to a mismatch of goods demanded and goods supplied. The bullwhip effect is a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect U.S. retailers are sitting on inventories of items that no one wants to buy, while items in demand are short on supply. And supply chain interruptions make the mismatch between supply and demand even worse. Meanwhile, COVID is still causing a sufficient amount of sickness to introduce instability into the labor market. Because places of business are no longer taking precautions against infection, every place of employment becomes a potential site for a super spreading event. The small business where my son is employed literally ran out of healthy employees at one point because so many were too ill with COVID to come to work.
After the 2008 crash, the Fed kept the economy growing by holding interest rates down at an extreme low rate for an extended period of time. With the current labor shortage plus the embargo on Russian petroleum pushing up prices, the fed left itself lots of room to do what it does to avoid inflation -- raise interest rates. Will that cause a recession -- maybe. If you look at the process we use to determine when a recession has occurred, it generally takes a year or so after the trough to decide whether there has been a recession. That's because the entity that makes the determination looks at lots of factors, including duration, severity, and impacts on several different economic measures.
Given the length of the current expansion, a recession of some kind would not be a surprise. But proclaiming that we've been in a recession for a month displays only ignorance of how the economy actually works and the words we use to describe economic events. If you extrapolated the pre-pandemic GDP in a straight line based on the pre-pandemic trends, we're right at where we would expect to be if the pandemic had never happened. That's a pretty quick recovery from a world shattering event that isn't over yet.
Let's try less hysteria and more common sense.