I think a while back I did a similar exercise where I looked at employment sans government, construction and manufacturing. Now I want to look at output more generally
This time we are going to take out government and residential investment. Both have seen unprecedented declines in the last few years.
Here is the economic growth without government and residential investment over the last decade.
While that isn’t the most robust recovery one could image it tops out at better than the economy performed over the peak of the last expansion.
I’ll pull back a little to see how this metric compares over time. I only have quarterly data back to 1995 but we can still see some interesting stuff.
One the non-government non-residential economy was just on fire in the 90s. Its so interesting I have to see which one is responsible. Here is just sans government.
Even better. I think we average over 5% real growth over much of that period. Interestingly still not too, too bad post-recession.
Here is just sans-residential
That’s clearly a littler more muted. Definitely under 5% for most of the period.
A couple of other things to note after seeing those charts.
1) If you don’t account for government employment then you can see a slow slide into recession starting all the way back in 2004. On the other hand if you don’t count housing, the economy just got whacked from out of left-field in 2008 but came back strong after 18 months.
2) Sans residential growth is surprisingly consistent between before the recession and after.
That’s growth here is a quick look at levels
Sans-residential and government
We can see full recovery even after the GDP revisions. And in many ways this recessions looks more natural than the dot-com bust.
This is just sans-government
This is just sans-residential
Interestingly there was no dot-com bust if you don’t count housing. I’ll have to look more into that.
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Saturday ~ August 27th, 2011 at 1:31 am
White Rabbit
The sit-com bust was most pronounced in equity valuations, not so much in actual real output.
It was also the first recession we experienced on the (social) web, which magnified the experience, compared to earlier busts which were filtered and muted through the mass media.
So the dot-com bust was a relatively minor one and Greenspan vastly overcompensated it (and 911) with nearly a decade of non-stop easing, stupidly setting up one of the biggest busts of all times – compounding his mistake with encouraging the GOP to run a huge deficit (an additional stimulus worth 3-5 trillion dollars) in a boom …