{"id":47237,"date":"2019-07-15T17:20:06","date_gmt":"2019-07-15T22:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47237"},"modified":"2019-07-15T17:20:16","modified_gmt":"2019-07-15T22:20:16","slug":"its-been-a-great-recession-for-a-few-lets-do-it-all-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47237","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Been a Great Recession for a Few; Let\u2019s Do it All Again!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thegreatrecession.info\/blog\/great-recession-for-a-few\/\">It\u2019s Been a Great Recession for a Few; Let\u2019s Do it All Again!\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/thegreatrecession.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Jobless_Men_Keep_Going_Sign-500x307.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This month the economic expansion brought to you by your Federal Reserve and by US government largess becomes the longest expansion in the history of the United States! That\u2019s something, right? Something? Let\u2019s take an honest look at what we now call great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By \u201cthe longest expansion\u201d we mean the longest period in which US GDP has been growing without a recession. Now, that\u2019s something to crow about, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not so fast for many reasons. It\u2019s also been the most anemic expansion on the books, and it\u2019s not too hard to see why it\u2019s been the longest, having nothing at all to do with a great economy. It has cost us far more than any expansion (<em>by an order of magnitude<\/em>) because we\u2019ve piled up&nbsp;<em>ten times<\/em>&nbsp;the national debt over any amount we accumulated during previous expansions. (I\u2019ve said before, it\u2019s easy to let the \u201cgood times\u201d roll when you are buying it all on the company credit card.) We also quadrupled the size of the size of the Fed\u2019s balance sheet. That didn\u2019t cost anything, but we sure didn\u2019t get much bang for the buck! We actually got less bang than in&nbsp;<em>any<\/em>&nbsp;previous expansion!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The permanent recession<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sure, we got outstanding growth in stocks, but growth in business revenue has been pathetic. Growth in corporate development has been even worse (i.e., new plants, improved productivity, etc.) Growth in earnings was decent, except for the fact that it is entirely a feint because it was created mostly by reducing the numbers of outstanding shares over which earnings are divided, not so much by growing business. (Why do you think Wall Street prefers to talk about \u201cearnings per share, \u201d EPS, instead of just actual profits?)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s Been a Great Recession for a Few; Let\u2019s Do it All Again!\u00a0 This month the economic expansion brought to you by your Federal Reserve and by US government largess becomes the longest expansion in the history of the United States! That\u2019s something, right? Something? Let\u2019s take an honest look at what we now call [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11574,11042,827],"class_list":["post-47237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-david-haggith","tag-the-great-recession-blog","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47239,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47237\/revisions\/47239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}