Understanding America’s New Depression
Jim Rickards believes the United States is in a depression and has been for years. Rickards explains that economists ignore this reality, because there is no precise mathematical definition of a depression. This allows them to point to statistics like the growing GDP and improving jobs numbers as proof of an economic recovery.
However, Rickards points out that no American investor today has actually lived through a depression, so their conception of it is completely off-base. In his latest commentary, he sets out to explain exactly what a depression is and why the US has been in one since 2007.
The starting place for understanding depression is to get the definition right. You may think of depression as a continuous decline in GDP. The standard definition of a recession is two or more consecutive quarters of declining GDP and rising unemployment. Since a depression is understood to be something worse then a recession, investors think it must mean an extra-long period of decline. But that is not the definition of depression.
The best definition ever offered came from John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 classic, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes said a depression is, ‘a chronic condition of subnormal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency towards recovery or towards complete collapse.’
Keynes did not refer to declining GDP; he talked about “subnormal” activity. In other words, it’s entirely possible to have growth in a depression. The problem is that the growth is below trend. It is weak growth that does not do the job of providing enough jobs or staying ahead of the national debt. That is exactly what the U.S. is experiencing today.
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The point is that GDP growth; rising stock prices and falling unemployment can all occur during depressions, as they do today. What makes it a depression is ongoing below trend growth that never gets back to its potential. That is exactly what the U.S. economy is experiencing. The New Depression is here.”
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