Wow, you got me. :rolleyes:
There’s nothing contradictory at all about what I said. Quarterly GDP growth was recorded (depending on the metric and sources you use) as early as Q3 of 2009, but quarterly growth doesn’t just magically appear. The economic recovery began earlier as a result of a financial intervention by governments and central banks, not only in the United States but worldwide. So yes, the recovery began in early 2009.
I am no Trump apologist, but if you think that his fiscal policy hasn’t been a (short-term) positive influence on the stock market, you’re kidding yourself. Only time will tell if the tax reform is beneficial in the long run though.
Let’s try to keep the discussion focused on the USA, since that’s clearly the area we’ve been discussing. Here is the description that Wikipedia gives for an “economic recovery”:
What do you think? Decent definition? Or would you like to propose an alternative?
Do you agree that the GDP did not grow in Q1 nor Q2 of 2009? And do you agree that we lost jobs 11 out of 12 months in 2009?
Good Googling and Wiki skills.
Doesn’t change the fact that the economy began turning around before the quarterly data made the recovery official. The jobs losses that you’re referring to occurred as a result of the evaporation of investment wealth, the collapse of financial institutions, the near collapse of our entire financial system, and the freezing of credit. You can’t just look at what happened in the first quarters of 2009 without acknowledging what happened in the last half of 2008. Similarly, you can’t look at what happened in the last quarter of 2009 without acknowledging what took place in the months leading up to that time. And similarly again, you can’t describe Trump’s economic growth of 2017 without acknowledging the previous 6-8 year period before he took office.
Again, I don’t give Obama all the credit, but there’s no question that his policies were a stabilizing force on the economy. Some might argue that stability came at the expense of growth, and I don’t necessarily disagree. But that’s a fundamental difference in philosophy between progressive (and even centrist) economists and their right wing ideological counterparts: would you rather have less growth but with relative certainty that your investments and savings won’t evaporate in a flash, or would you rather have torrid growth and go from boom to bust cycles every 5-10 years like we did pretty regularly before 1933?
I asked you several direct questions. You don’t appear to have provided an answer to a single one of them. Could you do me a favor and pick even just one of the questions I asked in #103 and provide a yes or no answer to it? Here, I’ll try to do you the same courtesy:
My answer would hinge largely on the numerical values for “less growth” and “torrid growth”. Thinking back through recent decades, there certainly appear to be periods of torrid growth and boom and bust cycles, so I’m not sure why you constrain the question to “before 1933”. The first thought that came to mind was “that’s a bit like asking if I’d rather invest in bonds or stocks” and the truth is I’m invested fairly heavily in stocks today and that will probably only shift gradually as I get nearer to retirement, so I guess I’m in the “torrid growth” + volatility camp, at least to the extent I’ve got to pick one or the other.
A few thoughts on the stock market…
Yes, I agree that Trump has probably helped push the stock market along in several ways. With an emphasis on deregulation across the board, and particularly with respect to deregulation in finance, I think companies are looking toward more profits, with the proviso that the fundamentals of the economy remain the same. And most investors agree that the fundamentals of the economy are already rather strong. So I don’t discount Trump’s impact in terms of how investors perceive the potential future impact of his policies.
That being said, the fundamentals of the economy were already strong well before he entered office. As I mentioned in the post to HD, investors and economists would probably argue that Obama’s strong fundamentals came at the expense of growth, and I don’t disagree with that either. But lack of 3% growth or not, the fundamentals have created an economy in which people graduating from university can expect to have a job within 3 months in a lot of cases. Trump inherited an economy in which fewer and fewer people were worried about their long term economic health. Not all of the credit goes to Obama, I agree, but the policies basically reassured people that the government was going to keep banks and financial firms honest for one thing, and that money supply would lead to healthy lending.
Trump’s impact on the economy has been felt in the short term, but the true test is the longer term. With each day that passes, with every new decision that is made, more and more of Trump’s fingerprints will end up on the economy. Every single decision, while not having a particularly noticeable impact on the economy by itself, contributes to a cumulative effect over time. As we saw with George W Bush’s 2 terms: these things take time.
I answered your questions, although perhaps not in the binary manner you had expected or hoped.
If you look at the famous “bikini graph”, you will see that jobs were being lost all the way through 2009. But, if you actually look at it, you will see that jobs were being lost at a faster and faster rate, until early 2009, and then jobs are being lost at a slower and slower rate, until late 2009 and into 2010, jobs actually start being added.
The early 2009 is when the economy started flattening out fro the nose dive that it was heading into. As Obama and the democrats at the time were very active in the economy, and did pass a number of bills aimed at staunching the job loss and improving the economy, they do get some credit for that turnaround.
But, just so that we can stop this line, after looking at that graph of job losses, and how it made a turnaround in early 2009, will you accept it as a valid point for saying when the economy turned around and started on the path that it was on throughout the rest of the Obama admin?
Also, if you’re going to refer to the recovery, can you please acknowledge what it was a recovery from?
Economic prognostication is difficult even for economists, and IANAE, but this is what I fear. Trumps policies, which might be good in the short term, are probably bad in the long term. And when I say “good”, I say that as mainly affecting the very rich. The folks at the bottom might get a little bit, but the bulk of the good is going to the very rich. I don’t even think it’s going to the rich, so much, but to the very rich.
“Good” means something affecting only the very rich? You mean “good” as in “terrible”?
We’re going to keep trying voodoo economics until it works, dammit!
It’s a recovery from melanin tainted economic policies.
Can we take a second here and get our heads straight. Economic policies are meant to serve the interests of the nation. So making rain for the donor class isn’t “good” unless you mean just for you, and you are willing to ID as a member of that class and argue why your interests are more important than everyone elses.
I’m just saying that the policy is either good or bad in it’s reasoning and execution, right from the start. It’s going to stink or be OK right then.
All that “good” money that went to a rich person to make jobs or burn it or whatever he wants, came from someone who did without it.
That bikini chart looks off, at least to my eyes. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth shows that the job losses peaked in March 2009, with a loss of 802k. The chart you linked to doesn’t accurately reflect that.
Anyways, to your broader point, I understand that Obama took over in the middle of a recession and that it ended not long afterwards. I know that Congress passed some bills aimed at trying to ameliorate that recession, both at the end of the Bush presidency and the beginning of the Obama presidency, largely at the presidents’ behest. I think it’s eminently debatable how much and what effect Obama’s policies in particular had on the recession, but I don’t find the debate terribly interesting (I suspect each posters’ views will fall largely in line with their partisan leaning), and it’s definitely not the topic of this thread.
I had a specific (and minor) quibble about asahi’s claim about “early 2009” when the recession continued through the first two quarters of 2009, but it’s not terribly important, and has sidetracked the thread rather heavily, so I’m happy to set it aside.
That was a random one that I picked because it was the first image that came up in google. I didn’t really look at it too closely, as I was much more familiar with it when it was relevant. But it sounds like your quibble here is that the Jan line is a bit longer than the March line. I was just going for the trend.
The cite that you picked, however, is a much better cite, so many props on that. According to your cite, would you not agree that there is very visible improvement in the economy, starting in early 2009?
Democrats had power at the time, having taken a number of seats in 2006. They worked closely with Obama to have fiscal policies on his desk to sign. Obama personally, hard to say how much effect he had, democratic policies in general, they saved the economy.
The economy and the president’s approval rating are often closely linked, so it is not that much of a derail, and we did answer the objection you had to the difference in time of considering the economy to have turned around by a few months.
It’s funny how when you were arguing with me you took the position that a reduction in the rate of growth meant the economy was doing worse. You seem to have abandoned that position now that it’s no longer in your interest to take it.
(I should verify–are you aware that you are taking a different position here than you did earlier?)
That’s part of it. The bigger issue is that there’s a horizontal line labeled “-800,000” that the March line does not exceed, or even reach. It’s not a big deal.
Certainly the rate of job losses slowed down after March 2009. It was still shedding jobs (on a monthly basis) as late as September 2010. I can agree that that, for example, December 2009’s 277,000 job losses is less bad than March’s -802,000, but I wouldn’t be comfortable making the claim that there was “an economic run that started in early 2009”, given that the economy was still shedding jobs and GDP was contracting at that point.
If one’s measurement of “economic runs” is based on high and low points, not growth vs shrinkage, then it would appear that Obama’s “run” ran from March 2009 to May 2010, when job growth peaked (and therefore has been in decline ever since). If you wanted to perform the same analysis by GDP, then the high point was 2014 Q3, when GDP growth peaked at 5.2%, and the economy has been getting worse since then. That doesn’t seem like a particularly useful, or standard, way of measuring economic performance to me, but different strokes for different folks.
Perhaps you should clarify for me. Could you cite the posts / portions thereof that you’re referring to?
Wait, what?