\nSo I’m still wrestling with the disconnect between the economy I see on the street here in Torrance – which is strained, but not broken – and the level of hysteria I see in the media (including the blogs) about our current economic turmoil. Note that I’m unemployed as I write this, yet pretty comfortably optimistic.<\/p>\n
This isn’t about current politics (yet). I’m in favor of the steps that Bush took and that Obama seems to be taking (with some pretty serious concern about the ‘quality’ of the spend in the stimulus package). But before I get there, I am trying to orient myself.<\/p>\n
So here’s some data, and I’d love to trigger some discussion and insight from the crowd. Basic question: is panic really the right reaction?<\/p>\n
Here’s a table of the incidences of negative chained GDP since WWII (from NBER). When there were multiple quarters with negative GDP growth, I summed them so that the ‘incident’ had a total percent change summing all the adjacent negative quarters. Note that some of these are single-quarter, and so not officially ‘recessions’.<\/p>\n
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