[ExI] "recession is going to end in about 6 weeks"

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:03 AM, scerir at tiscali.it <scerir at tiscali.it> wrote:
> Rafal:
>
> He is pointing to the observations from the previous 6 recessions
> - did you follow the link?
> (http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2009/04/another_green_s.html )
>
> #  The best paper about all that (to my knowledge) is the following
> http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/rogoff/files/Aftermath.pdf
>
### Excellent article. I would point your attention to fig. 4. The
distribution is dominated by a few crises with very long durations,
although the median seems to be a bit more than a year. Now, are you
going to base your bets on the mean or the median? Imagine we had a
bet for, oh, let's say $1000, the issue being whether the recession
(measured by per capita GDP) ends before the end of 2009 or not? How
would you bet?

Of course I don't know how long the recession will last. On this list
I merely pointed to some reasonable analyses done by smart people, who
expect a recovery soon. I do not have the skills to achieve a
justifiably confident prediction myself. On the other hand, I am
reasonably certain nobody here can make such justifiably confident
prediction either. So far the article that Brent linked to didn't
provide much relevant information, and scerir's link could actually be
interpreted as a basis for optimism, since the predicted duration of
decline in per capita GDP would suggest recovery is just about the
corner.

But, as I said, I don't know.

Rafal