Boom-und-Bust-Zyklen

Worum es geht

Aggregate economic activity does not grow smoothly. It moves in expansions that end in peaks and contractions that end in troughs, spread across output, employment, income and spending at roughly the same time. Burns and Mitchell fixed that description in 1946, and the NBER committee still dates US cycles by it. What causes the movement is the open question. The demand tradition starting with Keynes puts it in swings of spending and expectations; the monetarist tradition of Friedman and Schwartz puts it in the money stock and central bank error; real business cycle theory puts it in technology and other real shocks propagated through optimal choices; the financial tradition of Fisher, Minsky, Bernanke and the macro-financial historians puts it in credit, leverage and balance sheets; the Austrian tradition puts it in interest-rate distortion and malinvestment; behavioural and narrative accounts put it in socially contagious belief. These are not stages of a consensus being built. They are live competitors, and a learner who cannot state the strongest version of each has not learned the subject.

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• What actually causes booms and busts?

  7 benannte Positionen · Genuinely unresolved. There is no mainstream verdict, the schools are not stages of a single converging enquiry, and most working macroeconomists hold a mixed view weighted by episode. Teach the mechanisms, the evidence each can point to, and the objection each has never answered — and label any single-cause claim, including the popular ones, as contested.

• What is the negative technology shock in a recession?

  4 benannte Positionen · The strong technology-shock reading is not the mainstream explanation of recessions; the modelling apparatus it introduced is universal. Teach the Prescott-Summers exchange as a set piece in what counts as evidence.

• What made 1929-1933 a catastrophe rather than a bad recession?

  5 benannte Positionen · The monetary and gold-standard elements are close to consensus as major contributing mechanisms; their relative weights, and the role of the initial demand collapse, remain argued. Note that Bernanke ran the Federal Reserve in 2008 as a scholar of this dispute — the practical stakes of historical interpretation are unusually explicit here.

• Were oil shocks or monetary policy responsible for stagflation?

  4 benannte Positionen · Three-cornered and live. The episode nonetheless settled a different question decisively — the exploitable long-run Phillips trade-off does not exist — which is why it reorganised the profession.

• Does the inverted yield curve predict recessions, and if so why?

  4 benannte Positionen · Strong historical correlate, weak causal story, small sample. Correct handling is a probability shift, not a prediction — and the current episode should be checked live rather than assumed.

Mythen, die das Paket korrigiert

Verbreitete Behauptungen mit der Evidenz, die sie klärt oder begrenzt.

• “A recession is two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP.”

  debunked-as-stated

  The NBER committee that dates US cycles uses depth, diffusion and duration across several monthly series — real personal income less transfers, payroll and household employment, real consumer spending, wholesale-retail sales and industrial production — with GDP as one input among them. The rule fails in both directions: the two-month contraction of 2020 was dated a recession without two negative quarters, because depth and diffusion were extreme, and the two consecutive negative quarters of US real GDP in the first half of 2022 were not, because employment and income kept rising. The rule of thumb is not useless — it is a fast screen, and the euro-area committee also weighs quarterly GDP — but it is a proxy, not the definition.

• “Economists know what causes business cycles — one school has established the mechanism, and the others are outdated.”

  debunked

  There is no consensus mechanism. Keynesian demand, monetarist money, real business cycle technology shocks, credit and financial instability, Austrian malinvestment, and behavioural or narrative accounts are all live, all supported by some evidence, and all carrying unanswered objections. The negative results are the strongest evidence for this: Cochrane's survey found that none of the measured candidate shocks explains much of output variance, and Angeletos, Collard and Dellas found the dominant empirical cycle factor to be nearly unrelated to both inflation and measured productivity. Individual episodes are better understood than the general mechanism, and the episodes differ from each other — the 2020 recession fits no theory in which the boom creates the bust. What is established: the descriptive record, the dating practice, the amplifying role of leverage and balance sheets, and the absence of an exploitable long-run inflation-unemployment trade-off. What is not: the impulse.

• “Modern policy has tamed or abolished the business cycle — the Great Moderation showed that deep recessions belong to the past.”

  debunked

  The volatility decline was real; the inference was not. Stock and Watson attributed a large share of it to smaller shocks rather than to better policy — good luck, which can end. Five years after the 2003 address the deepest contraction since the 1930s arrived, and a plausible reading is that the financial deepening which suppressed short-run volatility was simultaneously accumulating the leverage behind it, exactly the pattern Minsky described as stability being destabilising. Read the primary documents rather than the caricature: the arguments were careful and conditional, which is what makes the episode worth teaching.

• “An inverted yield curve reliably predicts recession.”

  boundary-correction

  The correlate is real and survives serious testing: the term spread beats most alternatives out of sample and kept working after it became famous. Four boundaries apply. The sample is small — under ten independent US episodes since 1960, so a single miss materially changes the record. False signals exist, including the mid-1960s inversion, and the 2019 inversion was followed by a pandemic that no yield curve anticipated. Lead times vary from roughly six months to two years, which makes the signal useless for timing. And the mechanism is disputed between expectations of future policy easing (the curve reports a forecast rather than causing anything), term-premium compression, and pressure on bank lending margins. The 2022-2023 inversion, the deepest since the early 1980s, had not been followed by an NBER-dated recession as of this package version — a live boundary case a research agent should check against current data rather than assume. Correct use is a shift in probability, not a prediction.

• “Economics recognises Kondratiev long waves of roughly fifty years, and they can be used to locate where we are in the current wave.”

  debunked-as-stated

  Long waves are not established economics. Garvy's 1943 critique showed the waves are largely produced by the trend-elimination procedure and by the price series chosen, and that the record contains at most two or three claimed cycles — too few to support any claim of periodicity. Solomou's tests on output data for the major economies found no robust Kondratiev wave. Slutsky's result applies directly: summed random shocks plus a detrending choice generate convincing-looking long swings from nothing. The kernel of truth is that long-horizon phenomena do exist and are studied — Kuznets swings in construction and demography, Borio's financial cycle of roughly sixteen to twenty years, and long technology diffusion waves — but none of them licenses locating a present position on a fifty-year clock. Kitchin and Juglar cycles, by contrast, are modest, empirically grounded, and rarely the ones being sold.

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