When the US real estate market started tanking, how was the boom supposed to continue? More construction in an over-supplied housing market? Re-train workers overnight and give them jobs in other industries? Transmute wood, concrete, shingles, tractors, bulldozers, and excavators into other materials and tools for other industries?
Basically there is a difference between
1. 10 people growing bananas when the economy would be better off with 7 people growing bananas and 3 people growing apples. 2. 9 people growing bananas and 1 person sitting on his butt doing nothing because he can't find a banana growing job. Even though the economy would be better off with 10 banana growers then none.
The problem with recessions is that per person productivity usually goes up but less people are employed. This phenomenon is hard to explain without referencing aggregate demand.
Yep, that simple. That's called investment multiplier, and economists were discussing at the late 00's how it could vary from one company to the other given the Keynes' identities.
You do realize that Keynes' departure from 'classical' economics was a model that depended more on aggregate demand than supply, right?
Classical economics (ie. pre-Keynesian economics) would say "just build more". Keynesian economics states that you should stimulate demand (lower interest rates, increase government spending, increase money supply, etc...). Which is exactly what got us out of the recession.
> It blows my mind that Keynesians can't identify busts that were caused by bubbles.
It's not about whether they can or can't. Some obviously did see the bubble coming (some Goldman Sachs traders famously bet against the housing market). The problem is that too many people profit from the 'bubble', and momentum takes people over the edge (because, like it or not, consumers are NOT rational).
It's what caused it in the first place. i.e. 2% interest ninja loans, CRA, "home ownership society", gov't-sponsored entities, etc...
Low interest rates by themselves wouldn't have caused the recession, although rates probably should have been higher during that time period anyway.
Also keep in mind it's only recently that Keynesian and left-wing economics has become fashionable once again...
wat.
We're not out of it, people are just adapting to it.
Think about it.
Anyhow, low-ish interest rates were the norm for most of the US' history, rates will go up, but get used to low rates. Keeping the banks in line (not taking too much leverage) is the key to preventing another bust, not raising interest rates.
Regardless, low interest rates don't mean the US is still in a recession. There's 5% unemployment and the economy is growing. Heck, 2 of Europe's stronger economies (Switzerland and Sweden) have negative rates.
Example: our corporate customers decided to buy 5 more widgets in 2007 than in 2008 because they saw the economy improving, mostly due to the growth of household on-paper wealth and the associated increase in consumer spending, and were forecasting a growth in their own business. When the housing market collapsed and consumer spending fell off a cliff, those customers no longer had any reason to buy the extra widgets.
In that way, you can say output is artificial. A large mass of people spending above their means because of a perceived increase in wealth, along with other psychological factors, leads to an economy with rising demand. When it turns out that wealth increase was a phantom and those psychological factors disappear, there is less demand for widgets and thus output decreases.
Output isn't "how much we can make," it's "how much we DO make." The amount we produce is proportional to the demand for that product.
I went through a scenario much like this. Company had a single customer that is dominant, and that customer was over optimistic about the level of demand it was seeing from it's marketplace. Orders grew to large levels, company expands, etc...
Then reality hits. That customer has a ton of inventory and wants relief!
Worse, they could just order nothing and do a sell off for a time to recover, but that may destroy a valued partner, who didn't really do anything wrong, other than supply what they could have seen as too much. Long term, that is expensive for them as they would lose a valuable part of their product line.
The solution ended up being sharing the problem with both parties running very lean while inventory levels drop.
Now, coming out the other side, both parties are far more conservative. Risks are seen as bigger than they really are, and overall run rate business just isn't what it should be based on the data from before. Inventory, sales, and some other data is more closely tracked to answer the questions of "what DO we make?", and "Will it sell?" by both parties, who share the impacts of those answers.
Hysteresis, in the sense being talked about here, could arise from artifacts of an event like this. When things were running high, expansion came either at the expense of capital held by the company, or debt, and both of those have impacts on the risk appetite of the business. It's all moderated now.
That moderation is both real, in terms of hard data, cash, etc... and human, in that raw fear of another instability causing everyone to lose gains had since that last one...
It's been an interesting journey. The reality is a took a very considerable time to reach a point where meaningful risks make sense again. About two years. This, despite the problem itself resolved within 6 - 8 months.
Turns out, the motivation to take some new risks and make reasonable investments is being driven by a slight downward trend in sales. It's not much, but it's not growth. The additional "hysteresis" impact appears to be felt through the marketplace. That big event seemed to dampen way more than one would expect at first glance.
I believe that slight trend is the change in risk / value perception as well as the market seeing the brand fluctuate and that resulting in a loss of confidence, or a crack where competing brands gained some ground. This is hard to resolve though. There isn't enough data. I've made some changes in marketing in an attempt to get it, and or just correct for the trend in an obvious, measured way. Jury is still out on that.
Having production satisfy demand is very important in the vast majority of cases. Overproduction either tends to create instability, or a reduction in value as too much is out there, or high inventory costs that tend to marginalize the value of an overproduction event. Exceptions can be, say an overproduction to insure supply during a planned downtime, or expansion, but that can be expensive money and resource availability...
As an example, with housing prices so high there was a surge in homebuilding. No one really needed or wanted all those homes, so the demand for ex. shingles was artificially high. It would make no sense to introduce some kind of stimulus program to prop up the shingle market to its housing bubble peak. Nobody needs or wants that many shingles at that price.
The issue I take with the article is that their study compares growth levels during recovery to growth levels right before a market crash. It's not sensible; of course the latter will be higher, that's how market psychology works. It doesn't make sense to think of "potential growth" as "the highest growth we've seen."