But this didn't stop the financial institutions crippling the prudent layperson (jobs, endowments, pensions, etc) in efforts to save their own necks.
It has been a disgraceful exhibition from these supposedly upright bodies and I don't take kindly to being told that 'everything is alright really' when so many ordinary folk have had their lives altered irreparably.
I am not an economist, but...
Is that really a logarithmic scale? The caption says so, but the scale doesn't look logarithmic to me.
If it *is* plotted logarithmically, wouldn't that be artificially smoothing out the appearance of the peaks and troughs?
I believe Bernard Madoff made similar claims for his business.
It would be interesting to overlay a chart of global population on this graph. Does GDP merely increase because the population is rising?
If you overlaid the chart with a population chart would it be an exact match?
Perhaps though it shows that crisis are more frequent since we went off the gold standard, though you might need a longer data set to be sure.
More or less, it is also the period of cheap oil, and some other commodities. Additionally, there has not been a major geophysical event. If things are changing, however, things might happen, as around 2200 BC, 1500, BC, the 6th Century, and the 17th.
I'd like to go into more depth, but I need to devote some time this evening to my personal contribution to the world's GDP. If anyone fancies digging in more detail, that graph is on page 129 of the 226-page PDF linked to in the article.
"The Great Depression was very painful, but the world economy actually recovered long before WW2 and all that enforced government spending" Outside the USA it recovered fairly quickly, yes, because the economic orthodoxy of the day was to let the markets adjust. In the USA it was prevented from recovering by various government initiatives until the inflation associated with WWII priced people back into jobs.
I am tempted to say 'so what'?
Population has increased enormously and that in itself will increase GDP.
What is the increase in GDP pre head? The plain fact is individually we are nothing like as wealthy as the rise in the graph would suggest. Just go to Glasgow North East ...
Yes, it's a logarithmic scale (one of the statisticians' most basic tricks to distort data). For example, the great depression actually dropped output by more than 20%.
By the way, I love their graphs on page 141, which claim to show that reducing interest rates, and increasing government spending, reduce the output losses from a crisis. Their trend lines are unconnected to the actual data plotted as far as I can see, and the small print indicates that the graphs "report conditional plots that take into account the effect of several other controlling variables".
The foreward to the document says that "It is still too early for policymakers to relax their efforts to restore financial sector health
and support demand with expansionary macroeconomic policies".
We ought to be clear that the IMF are not some unbiassed objective referee.
GDP per head would be more instructive.
Also, this period coincides with mankind's era of cheap, fossil-fuelled energy and, therefore, relentless economic growth. We are now all but at the end of mankind's era of cheap energy. I ha' mae doots that we'll be recovering from this mess as readily as we appear to have done in the past,
But a good war is good for business?
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