For the first time ever, or at least since
official tallying began, the U.S.
economy has started and ended an entire decade
without entering a recession.
That means this economic expansion is now older
than the i-Pad Instagram and the Tesla Model S
From the end of 2009 to the end of 2019, the U.S.
economy has added more than 20 million jobs.
We have launched an economic boom, the likes of
which we have never seen before.
It's been the longest economic expansion in the
country's history taking place in a decade marked
by the memory of the Great Recession and by
unprecedented access to information about the
state of the economy.
Both consumers have been more cautious and
businesses have also become more cautious, simply
out of fear that we might experience something
similar to what we saw 10 years ago.
But just because it's the longest expansion
doesn't necessarily mean it's the strongest.
Overall economic growth over the past decade has
been slower compared to previous booms.
And not everyone is reaping the benefits.
Today in America, you got three people owning
more wealth than the bottom half of America.
So how did the U.S. get through this historic
decade? And will it last?
The simplest explanation for how the U.S.
economy has avoided a recession during this
decade is that it was coming from a very low
point at the end of the last decade.
As some economists have put it:
The deeper the hole, the longer it takes to climb
out. None of us anticipated the full
ramifications and extent of the crisis.
The economic picture from 2007 to 2009 was so
gloomy it's called the Great Recession.
Many experts define a recession as two
consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.
GDP or gross domestic product is one metric to
gauge the overall health of the economy.
In the U.S., a nonprofit organization called the
National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER,
decides if the economy has entered a recession.
The NBER takes into account GDP and a wider range
of measures like income, employment, industrial
production and wholesale-retail sales.
U.S. government agencies like the Treasury
Department and the Federal Reserve go by the
NBER's definition of a recession.
The most recent recession, according to NBER's
definition, was the Great Recession.
From 2007 to 2009.
U.S. GDP fell 4.3
percent. The unemployment rate doubled from 5
percent to 10 percent.
And house prices and stock markets crashed.
People were hit essentially both in terms of
losing their jobs and a lot of people were also
hit very significant in terms of losing their
homes and home prices going down and the stock
market going down. The only other time the
economy was in worse shape?
During the Great Depression in the 1930s.
A stock market crash and a series of banking
panics put an end to the economic boom of the
Roaring 20s. Millions of Americans lost their
jobs and livelihoods as the downturn lasted an
entire decade.
In the Great Depression of the 1930s,
unemployment peaked at almost 25 percent.
There were booms and busts and every decade after
World War Two. But one notable thing started to
happen. Economic expansions lasted longer.
The period from the mid-1980s to 2007 became
known as the Great Moderation.
Prices remain stable, and while there were
occasional dips on the whole, the economy chugged
along. One reason for this is that officials at
the Federal Reserve got more effective at
responding to changes in the economy and because
inflation was steady.
Policymakers could act aggressively when the next
crisis came along.
When the Great Recession hit, policymakers in DC
took unprecedented steps to try to get the
economy back on track.
Their actions resulted in trillions of dollars of
economic stimulus.
A very important reason why the U.S.
had had such a long and very protracted expansion
is that U.S.
fiscal policy and monetary policy, meaning the
Federal Reserve and politicians, were much more
quick out of the box in terms of supporting the
economy. In 2008, Congress authorized the
Treasury Department to invest hundreds of
billions of dollars to try to revitalize the
country's ailing financial and auto sectors as
part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program,
otherwise known as TARP.
A year later in 2009, President Obama signed the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The law pumped hundreds of billions of dollars
into areas like infrastructure and clean energy.
The biggest stimulus effort was underway in
another part of Washington at the Federal
Reserve. By the end of 2008, the central bank had
already lowered its key interest rate to
essentially zero. So it undertook an unusual
effort called quantitative easing, or QE.
David Wilcox worked at the Federal Reserve Board
during the crisis in the Division of Research and
Statistics. The Fed was able to come in and
purchase about 4 trillion dollars worth of
securities, drive up their price and therefore
bring down the interest rate at which businesses
were able to borrow.
Households were able to take out a mortgage.
Do you think that that those QE efforts helped
the economy recover and get to the point where it
is today? There is no question in my mind and
there's no question in any of the academic
literature that absent those steps, you would
have had an implosion of the economy, the likes
of which we hadn't seen since the 1930s.
The Fed has kept borrowing rates low throughout
the decade, gradually raising them at the end of
2015 through 2018 and then quickly cutting again
in 2019 to try to fend off any instability in the
economy. This past decade has been characterized
by very low interest rates and generally fiscal
stimulus. That means lower taxes, higher
government spending. In December 2017, President
Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,
which slashed corporate tax rates for American
companies. The effect was a boost to GDP at the
start of 2018.
Regulation rollbacks by the Trump administration
have also cut down some costs for businesses.
There's no denying the American economy is in
better shape at the end of this decade than the
last. As of December 2019, it expanded for a
record 126 straight months while the unemployment
rate was near its lowest level in 50 years.
Even though the last 10 years brought the longest
expansion ever in the US, it hasn't exactly been
an economic boom by historical standards.
Many Americans still feel left behind and this
decade has been marked as much by the growing
economy as increasing inequality.
There are pockets of the country and important
groups of individuals, communities, families,
households who still are not enjoying anything
that they would describe as economic prosperity.
GDP growth during this recovery has been slower
than in previous economic expansions.
Some investors point to mini recessions over the
past 10 years where GDP growth has just barely
exceeded 0 percent.
We've had a number of mini cycles within this
expansion, but generally speaking, if you look at
GDP over the last 10 years, it has really, and it
looks just amazing, been 2 percent for a very,
very long time. So it has been relatively flat.
The memory of the financial crisis has made
consumers and businesses more cautious about
spending money and more attuned to the next
recession. Unlike in previous decades, the
Internet has given consumers access to the latest
news and economic indicators, potentially making
them hyper aware of any changes in the economy.
I think because there was so many things that we
all missed in the financial crisis, both before
and when he was going on.
In terms of the speed of the slowdown, I do think
that both the press and consumers and the Federal
Reserve and us in financial markets are basically
much more alert to what's going on.
That caution has meant there aren't imbalances in
the financial system which has helped the
recovery go on for longer.
Typically, expansions end because they overheat.
What I mean by that is the economy is rip-
roaring, booming.
You know, you see a lot of construction,
overbuilding. You see a lot of borrowing, high
leverage. You see a lot of speculation in
markets. But in this expansion, we never really
got going. We don't have that overbuilding
problem. We don't have over-leverage in general.
But some of the steps policymakers took during
the crisis have only made inequality worse.
One glaring blemish is the gap between the haves
and the have nots. Look no further than the stock
market. U.S. markets are near record highs, but
many Americans have missed out on the bull run.
By one estimate, the wealthiest 10 percent of
Americans own more than 80 percent of the stock
market's wealth. As the stock market rises, you
know that this benefits that the top 20 percent
and really the top 10 percent and really the top
1 percent and really the top one tenth of 1
percent. So the wealth distribution is gotten
much more skewed. The other thing that's happened
is homeownership rates have declined.
Homeownership was key to the wealth of
middle-income Americans.
That obviously got creamed in the financial
crisis and the housing bust.
And so homeownership rate today is meaningfully
lower than it was when it peaked ten, fifteen
years ago. And that means that middle-income
Americans just haven't been able to build wealth.
Economists like to say expansions don't die of
old age, meaning there's no time limit for how
long a period of growth can happen.
But there are still warning signals that could be
pointing to the next recession.
Record low interest rates have fueled record high
debt levels. Some economists and investors fear
U.S. public debt, which totals more than 23
trillion dollars, is the next ticking time bomb.
That debt is only set to go up in the next
decades as America's population gets older.
And if interest rates go up, it will be even
harder for the government to pay off.
A lot of discussions whether the expansion can
continue or not is all about: Are we vulnerable
in the expansion because of student debt being so
high? Are we vulnerable in the expansion because
of corporate debt being so high?
Political and trade uncertainty are also creating
unease about the future health of the economy as
the U.S. enters a new decade.
The trade war that could really screw things up.
Businesses are very nervous, particularly larger
business with multinational operations.
Others look to technical indicators like the
yield curve, which has been flashing recession
signals. We know there will be a next recession.
We just don't know when it will be.
We don't know whether it will be six months from
now, a year from now or three years from now.
We haven't seen the last economic recession in
U.S. history. But maybe as the chairman of the
Fed has said, there can't be a bust when there
hasn't been a boom in the first place.
What we've seen is three of the four longest
business cycles in U.S.
recorded history have been quite recent.
So we're seeing that. And if you look at today's,
look at today's economy, there's nothing that's
really booming that would that would want to
bust, in other words. It's a pretty sustainable
picture.