The post Friday Charts: What if there are no more recessions? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. “Macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved.”  — Robert Lucas, 2003 I’m old enough to remember when people thought recessions might not be a thing anymore.  By the early 2000s, economists like Robert Lucas and Alan Greenspan argued that traditional recessions, in which a cyclical decline in demand led to a shrinking economy, were becoming an endangered species: less frequently seen and less dangerous when they were. This was known as “The Great Moderation,” but just as the idea was catching on, it was seemingly discredited by the “Great Recession.”  There was nothing moderate about the 2008 recession: Peak to trough, US GDP fell 4.3%, the largest decline since World War II. That should not have discredited the moderation thesis, however, because the Great Recession is more accurately known as the Great Financial Crisis — a financial own-goal that had little to do with macroeconomics. Nearly two decades later, the US still hasn’t experienced a recession in “the original sense.” The last traditional, business-cycle recession was way back in 1991, when Fed Chair Greenspan raised interest rates to 10.5% and unemployment rose to 7.8% — and even that was considered a mild downturn by the standards of the time. In the 34 years since, we’ve only had three recessions and they were all triggered by non-cyclical shocks: the dotcom bust and 9/11 in 2001, the financial crisis in 2008, and the Covid pandemic in 2020. As recently as last week it seemed like we were inevitably headed for a fourth. But this week, markets rallied on a rising consensus that we’d avoid it yet again. Which makes me wonder: If a sudden trade war can’t tip an aging expansion…

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Filed under: News - @ May 16, 2025 9:21 pm