Abstract
In this chapter I analyze the time period from 1965 to 2010 or 2012, depending on the variable being analyzed. For the most part I ignore the recession of the early 1980s, since that episode was analyzed in chapter 5. However, I do comment on it when it is necessary to illustrate important points relative to other recessions. I limit myself to this period in this chapter because that is the period for which I have found it easiest to obtain data for gross national revenue (GNR). This period will cover about one-and-one-half decades prior to the early 1980s recession and about three decades after that recession. During this period there were a number of episodes of the business cycle that can help one understand the causes of the cycle and see how Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) explains the cycle. Besides the recession of the early 1980s, there were recessions in 1970, 1975, the early 1990s, the early part of the new millennium, and in 2008–9. The latter could even be classified as a depression. Let us see what the data reveal.
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Notes
See Chapter 7 of Brian P. Simpson, Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, Volume 2: Remedies and Alternative Theories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) for a detailed discussion of the harmful effects of inflation.
Brian P. Simpson, Trade Cycle Theory: A Market Process Perspective (Ann Arbor, MI: Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company, 2000), p. 168.
For an example of a more comprehensive measure of spending used to analyze the Great Depression, see Jay Cochran III, “Of Contracts and the Katallaxy: Measuring the Extent of the Market, 1919–1939,” The Review of Austrian Economics vol. 17, no. 4 (2004), pp. 407–466.
John W. English and Gray E. Cardiff, The Coming Real Estate Crash (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1979), p. 36.
Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 51.
Yaron Brook, “The Financial Crisis: What Happened and Why,” video recording (August 4, 2009), http://arc-tv.com/the-financial-crisis-what-happened-and-why/, accessed February 22, 2013. In particular, hear part one of lecture three.
See Benjamin Powell, “Explaining Japan’s Recession,” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 35–50 on the Japanese recession. See especially pp. 42 and 44–47.
Steven Horwitz and Peter Boettke, “The House That Uncle Sam Built: The Untold Story of the Great Recession of 2008” (October 8, 2010), http://c457332.r32.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/HouseUncleSamBuiltBooklet.pdf, pp. 13–15, accessed February 22, 2013
See Horwitz and Boettke, “The House That Uncle Sam Built” for more discussion on these and other forms of interference. Also, hear Brook, “The Financial Crisis”; see Brook and Watkins, Free Market Revolution, pp. 47–59; and see John A. Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).
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© 2014 Brian P. Simpson
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Simpson, B.P. (2014). The Business Cycle in Late Twentieth-/Early Twenty-First-Century America. In: Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331496_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331496_7
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