When Palley and Taylor agree...

I switched on a computer that had been off for six months, and found something I didn't remember putting on the desktop: The Forces Making for an Economic Collapse (subtitle: Why a depression could happen) by Thomas I. Palley in the July 1996 issue of The Atlantic.

That's July of 1996.

I was going to quote Palley where he says a new Great Depression has become possible -- 1996, remember -- because it shows remarkable foresight. Instead, I'll file that under Recommended Reading and move on.

Here, Palley describes policy shortly before the "Goldilocks years" of the mid-to-late 1990s were to become obvious in hindsight:

... the Fed now interprets any sign of wage increases as incipient inflation, and responds by raising interest rates. Since wage increases are the means by which labor shares in productivity growth, this policy is tantamount to helping corporate and financial capital to gang up on labor.

The Federal Reserve vividly illustrated its new stance in 1994, when it raised interest rates six times. Just as the long-awaited economic recovery was picking up steam, the Fed slowed employment growth. It claimed that its action was necessary to prevent inflation from accelerating, but never produced compelling evidence of the danger of inflation...

The story since December 2015 is similar.

Palley didn't know it in July of 1996, but the economy was strong enough then to withstand a series of interest rate hikes and move ahead with vigor nonetheless.

We don't know it yet, but the economy today is probably strong enough again to withstand a series of interest rate hikes and still move ahead with vigor. And strong enough for the same reasons.


One more quote from Palley to emphasize the similarity between the 1990 recession and recovery, and the 2009 recession and recovery. While the '90 recession was still fresh in his mind, Palley wrote:

Just as the causes of the 1990 recession have been poorly explained, so have its prolonged nature and the weakness of the subsequent recovery. Economists consider the recession to have ended in the first quarter of 1991, but substantive recovery did not really begin until the second half of 1993. Thus for almost three years the economy was effectively dead in the water.

Dead in the water. We know about that. For crying out loud, even John Taylor in 2016 was saying "In several key ways the US economy resembles an economy at the bottom of a recession, ready for a restart".