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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (6424)	7/30/2001 4:31:47 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

I won't discourage you from your proposed project. Curious as to why you'd do US instead of Germany. The most comprehensive data sets I've seen on J6P are the results of the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances conducted by the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, this is one of the survey years, and the survey is presently on-going (April-November). So I don't think you'll see any data from the 2001 survey until next year. But you can use 1998 data. federalreserve.gov I know where you can find stuff like income distribution, housing prices, etc. - the US Census bureau has that all online via pdf. census.gov Latest survey of housing sales: census.gov Annual statistical abstract of the US: census.gov You can also find a wealth of information in the Fed's quarterly Flow of Funds report. I don't know if you noticed the arguments I had with Magner and Heinz recently about a Richebacher column claiming that credit expansion is poorly documented. I didn't think that was true, and in fact, it's not true. It's available online going back to 1954, in very great detail. federalreserve.gov I am working on the project, but mostly trying to get oriented. I agree with Richebacher that credit expansion and contraction are important, and just today started looking into that. Not sure what I can say that's helpful for investing short-term, I am looking at very large macroeconomic effects. My impression is that recessions are common, and easily understood. One segment of the economy can experience a recession (a mini-crisis) without affecting everything else too much. Depressions (maxi-crises) seem to result from several segments of the economy experiencing recessions simultaneously, putting more strain on the system than it can bear. These can be coincidental, which I think is true for the Great Depressions of the 1890's and the 1930's, or not. Being the theater for a war is something I would call a non-coincidental maxi-crisis. In both the 1890's and the 1930's, which were very bad, I think it's significant that coincident mini-crises were extended periods of drought, a purely monetary liquidity crunch (exogenous), and a boom-and-bust cycle in speculation (in the 1890s it was railroads). The Great Depression of the 1890's was worse than the one of the 1930's - in 1894 Michigan had 44% unemployment. No Federal Reserve to blame, either. Bad drought, most of the people worked on farms, the ones who didn't work on farms had atrocious working conditions for the most part, and when the factories became idle, no safety net. In the 1890's the exogenous purely monetary liquidity crunch was caused by war in Europe, sucking a lot of gold out of US banks. In 1928, France caused a worldwide exogenous purely monetary liquidity crunch by going back onto the gold standard at a devalued rate and sucking a very large chunk of gold into France, where it stayed. So that gives me some idea about what caused depressions in the past. Now that we are using electronic money, who knows what the future holds?