Bad Expansions Are In the Eye of The Beholder
Via Barry Rithholtz, I see that Martin Feldstein has not yet finished with his Atonement.
I think I’ve posted a variation of this before, but apparently I’ll have to keep screaming, at least throught Simchat Torah (and, I suspect, beyond).
Anyone have Feldstein appearances or editorials from early 2004 talking about how badly the economy was expanding? I just can’t seem to remember them…
The only way we got out of the last recession was via debt leverage:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=2Gw
How could the economy not voom when over $1T/yr of debt issue was hitting the masses?
Total debt to GDP: gives the big-picture view of what’s happening:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=2Gx
WASF.
Screaming does not, of course, make you any righter. Insisting that your favorite chart is all there is to the issue of whether this recovery is bad or worse doesn’t make you any righter. Another chart tells a different story:
http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html#category=Employment