But very useful charts anyway – thank you very much. And thank you for a very good blog, which is on my must-read list.

Mr Swartz’s charts are indeed very helpful. I think tho that one key one is missing – real estate values in previous recessions vs this one. That’s incredibly telling given that, as far as i know, only the ‘91 recession saw a drop, a only a small and momentary one at that. All other post-WWII recessions have seen a rise in real estate values. This one is seeing deep and prolonged declines, which is, o/c so central to almost everything else

Greg – I’ll agree that averages are only useful when viewed with the proper level of skepticism. The average lines will have a different number of recessions depending on the duration of the various time series; admittedly this is not ideal but one never has the data that one would like. I agree that having a measure of dispersion (high-low or st. dev) does have some value and if we can add that without making the charts too complicated for our average reader we may do that.

I’d argue that opposite which is that this recession is going to be less bad in China as it *doesn’t* depend on goods production and exports. If you look at the Chinese economy, it’s dominated by domestic infrastructure spending and investment, with exports playing an important but secondary role, whereas in the United States the economy is consumer driven.

For China to boost demand, all that it takes is someone in Beijing to say “more railroads.” By contrast for the United States to boost demand it requires either an increase in consumer confidence or else a rather large restructuring of the US economy away from consumption and toward investment, much of it state driven.

Well, we’ll see….

I have seen graphs over the past 30-50 years of that ratio.

But what I would like to see is a slightly different thing: the ratio between changes in GDP and changes in debt. That it is to treat debt as a quasi-factor of production, and to look the “debt intensity” of the economy. The blogger mentioning this said that one dollar of extra debt has resulted in an ever smaller increase in GDP, and currently IIRC it is less than one dollar (e.g. the increase in debt is faster than that in GDP) and soon for the USA it will be negative, as a dollar more of debt results in a decrease in GDP, at which point very very bad things happen.

As to that, long terms graphs of changes in GDP and in oil imports or total consumption are also interesting.

BTW apart from BradS other sites have interesting long term series. Yahoo! Finance has got long term stock market prices, the St. Louis Fed has got lots of long term national and regional series, there are some very nice periodically updated long term graphs here:

http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html

Mosler Economics has periodic posts of several graphs:

http://www.moslereconomics.com/2009/01/02/2009-01-02-user/

The charted data appear to reflect how much worse a recession the current one is than average. Most worrisome is that none of the recession measures yet show any turnaround. To me, that’s a sign we have a ways to go, probably another year and another -3% GDP contraction.

Again, thanks for making this available.

Very well compiled info. I look forward to updates.