The downturn’s longest shadow outside the United States fell on British productivity. For five decades before 2008, according to the Office for National Statistics, output per hour worked in the United Kingdom rose steadily by around 2 per cent a year. In the decade after the downturn it rose by 0.3 per cent a year, a weakness the ONS described in 2020 as deeper and longer than any since the 1890s.
Enacted as Public Law 111-5 in February 2009, the Recovery Act still goes by its first CBO estimate of $787 billion. Taken apart title by title, it held tax credits, money to keep state budgets whole, larger unemployment and food benefits, and roads and rail. Its cost kept moving with the recession, and the final CBO report on it, in 2015, settled on $836 billion.
Firms founded in a recession start smaller and stay smaller, and the cohort research blames missing customers more than tight credit: a firm opened in Poznań in 2009 met a market still spending, one opened in Madrid a contraction. Credit’s own part is the track record a bank asks for, and Wandoo Biznes says it does not require years of trading from a Polish one-person firm, looking more at the owner’s own financial history and the turnover on the account.
Early summer is when the studios release their blockbusters and their flops, and in the summer of 2023 the Federal Reserve was to release its own: FedNow, a platform for the instant settlement of payments between banks, which the Fed had described as infrastructure and its critics described as the plumbing for a digital dollar. This page kept two things about that moment: the argument being made for going further, and the Fed’s record, which was the argument against.
The third page in this series on artificial intelligence, written in April 2023, was about a claim the builders of the technology had started making about their own work: that it was becoming, in their words, godlike, that it might be sentient, and that they did not understand how it reached its conclusions. The claims were extravagant and came from people with every commercial reason to make them.
The recession calls, year by year, and how each came out.
Any three of these would have made a bad year. In July 2022 they were all on the same page of the newspaper.
Quantitative easing, the yield curve, the balance sheet and the soft landing.
The plan was to lay off workers who were already too few, to reduce production that was already lower than the year before, to lower prices that were high because production was short.
Bank failures, bail-ins, the war on cash and the digital dollar.
Seven days after Silicon Valley Bank went under, the Fed’s weekly balance-sheet release showed a jump of about 300 billion dollars. Officials said none of it was systemic, a bailout or QE.
Prices, wages, the labour market, and how each is measured.
A recessional is the hymn sung while the congregation files out. In 2022 it was sung to make the recession leave the room.
Stocks, bonds, housing and retail.
Revenue looked fine, considering. Considering what, was the whole story.
Deficits, debt, and how the news about them is made.
Millions who left the workforce in the lockdown had not come back. The policy response was to remove more.
This site keeps one subject: the downturn that began in 2008 and the policy, argument and consequence that followed it. Essays sit at the addresses where the argument was first made, so an old link still reaches a page about the thing it was pointing at.
Where enough time has passed for an argument to have been tested, a note at the foot of the page says how it came out. That is the point of the ledger: a forecast without a check is an opinion.
