Green Shoots

Categories: Econ, Metrics

Winter falls. Grass goes dormant. Trees have all lost their leaves. The landscape is a depressing mix of brown, grey, and white.

Eventually, the calendar turns and spring is on the way. The first buds of life start to peek out from the ground or appear at the end of tree branches. Green shoots. A sign of hope and the coming summer.

As with weather, so with economic cycles. A dreary economic downturn has finally run its course. Signs of growth start to appear. Unemployment drifts lower. GDP growth begins to accelerate.

Green shoots. A sign of hope and the coming recovery. There's probably a James Taylor song about this.

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Finance: What is a Business Cycle?3 Views

00:00

Finance allah shmoop What is a business cycle Well here's

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a guy giving his cycle the business Yeah the bike

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moves forward in time but this little white mark on

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the tire while it keeps returning to the same place

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again and again and again So yeah that's the foundation

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of the notion of business as a cycle time continues

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but you know business gets hot then cold then hot

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then cold and yeah you get the idea Well why

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is this the case Well lots factors They mostly revolve

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around the wild pagan dance of greed and fear And

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they get exacerbated when governments actively monkey around with the

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cost of renting money otherwise known as the raising and

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lowering of interest rates And if you're new to this

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whole space if you lower interest rates and make money

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cheap to borrow you heat up the economy or at

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least you encourage it to get hot And if you

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raise the cost of borrowing money well then you're going

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to try to cool it off And the reason he

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might want to do that is if inflation is roaring

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right All right well in the us the business cycle

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Runs roughly every eight years for what is called the

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short cycle of business cycles for reasons only partly known

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to humankind the money cycle revolves around the presidential election

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cycle when historically every couple of terms the population gets

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sick of one process of messing up government and they

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choose to elect a new way to mess up government

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So that's The short cycle happens every seven or eight

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years and you see it in the stock market with

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generally meaningful corrections Along that pattern there's also ate a

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long business cycle that sees major shift about every quarter

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century World wars affected numbers Technology innovation affects the numbers

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and other exogenous factors like pollution and labor replacement by

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robots Yeah yeah it's coming and healthcare or disease changes

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and or big innovations that completely repaint the pavement such

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that the tire slipped and turn and twist trying to

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keep the bicycle upright The key goal Look outfor bollards

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)