ON JANUARY 2nd Philadelphia was not only blanketed with four to six inches of snow, but five to six feet of economists. Almost 12,000 descended on the City of Brotherly Love to attend the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. If the chill in the air failed to dampen their spirits, it seemed to tinge the outlook of many presentations. Financial markets may have rung in 2014 with high hopes, but macroeconomists spy danger as far as the eye can see.
The worst of the recessions that followed the subprime mess may be over. But the economists gathered in Philadelphia insisted on pointing out that its legacy remains, in the form of huge debt loads, uncompetitive economies and high levels of unemployment. Across advanced economies debts stand at post-war highs, according to—presumably triple-checked—figures presented by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University. Those debts, they say, appear to be constraining recovery, blunting monetary expansion and limiting the political appeal of fiscal stimulus. And stubborn economic weakness has turned the European periphery’s woes into one of the most miserable episodes in modern economic history.
In this section
Back from the dead
Back with a boom
The mask is off
In the danger zone
Ex uno, plures
Pension complex
Fuelling controversy
This time is worse
Reprints
Related topics
United States
Recessions and depressions
Carmen Reinhart
Kenneth Rogoff
Business
Before the latest crisis Ms Reinhart and Mr Rogoff began building a database of financial crashes and their aftermath. Their work, gathered in “This Time Is Different” (2009), concluded that recoveries after financial crises are commonly weaker and more protracted than those after other recessions. Even so, the post-subprime era stands out.
Ms Reinhart and Mr Rogoff considered 100 of the most severe crises of the past 200 years. For each recovery they calculated the depth of the drop in output per person, adjusted for inflation, from the pre-crisis peak to its lowest point. They also totted up the time it took for output per person to return to the previous peak. They define this point as full “recovery”, even though qualifying economies may then produce well below the level of output per person expected before the crisis. America’s real output per person, for instance, is back above the pre-crisis peak, meeting the standard for recovery. Yet it remains about 9% (or roughly $5,000 per person) below the trendline expected in 2001.