by kublikhan » Fri 02 Oct 2015, 15:09:13
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile the US economy did enter a recession at the end of 2007, this was widely attributed to the collapse in consumer and business confidence that attended the subprime crisis and subsequent financial panic.
If supply shocks were the key factor behind the poor macroeconomic outcomes of the 1970s and early 1980s, why didn’t the most recent run-up in oil prices have similarly dramatic effects? As has been documented by a number of authors – including Hooker (1996, 2002), Blanchard and Gali (2007), and Nordhaus (2007) – oil shocks have had smaller macroeconomic effects since the early 1980s.
Thanks largely to an array of market reactions to higher energy prices after OPEC I and II, the US and other industrialised countries are now far less energy-intensive than they were in 1973. In the case of the US, the energy content of GDP (measured as the number of BTUs consumed per dollar of real output) has fallen dramatically since 1973 and is now about half of what it was then. By itself, this halving of the US economy’s energy intensity would also halve the macroeconomic impacts of oil shocks, with the reductions roughly equal for prices and quantities. We might expect substantially smaller contractionary effects following the more recent oil shocks because of the limited effect that oil prices now appear to have on core inflation.
Conclusions
In sum, the search for an explanation of why oil shocks have smaller impacts now than they did in the 1970s has not come up empty. Rather, it has turned up a long list of factors, no one of which appears to be dominant, but each of which may play some role. If that is correct, the supply-shock explanation of stagflation remains qualitatively relevant today, but it is less important quantitatively than it used to be. Thus with luck and sensible policy, food and energy shocks need not have the devastating effects that the supply shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s did.
Pstarr, did you link to the wrong article here? I can't find your quote in the article you linked to. Further, this author seems to fundamentally disagree with your positions on the causes of the great recession and the coupling of oil and economic growth. Did you mean to link to this article?
Will Collapse in Oil Price Cause a Stock Market Crash?
The oil barrel is half-full.