Economic Policies And The Great Recession Of 2008

Deficit spending refers to the extent at which the government expenditure exceeds revenue over the financial period. This is the opposite of budget surplus. We may apply the term to an individual, private company or government budget (Brux, 2011).

Max: Hi I’m Max Lessins. This is Crash Course for economics and today we’ll be discussing the Great Recession, focusing on the fiscal and monetary policies used to recover from the 2008 economic meltdown.

Our economy is a machine that is ran by humans. A machine can only be as good as the person who makes it. This makes our economy susceptible to human error. A couple years ago the United States faced one of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which was the Great Recession. The Great Recession was a severe economic downturn that occurred in 2008 following the burst of the housing market. The government tried passing bills to see if anything would help it from becoming another Great Depression. Trying to aid the government was the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve went through a couple strategies in order to help the economy recover. The Federal Reserve provided three major strategies to start moving the economy in a better direction. The first strategy was primarily focused on the central bank’s role of the lender of last resort. The second strategy was meant to provide provision of liquidity directly to borrowers and investors in key credit markets. The last strategy was for the Federal Reserve to expand its open market operations to support the credit markets still working, as well as trying to push long term interest rates down. Since time has passed on since the Great Recession it has been a long road. In this essay we will take a time to reflect on these strategies to see how they helped.

A recession occurs when a country’s real GDP begins to shrink. Even a milder economic slowdown in which GDP continues to grow, but very slowly can create unemployment and dislocation. GDP and employment are positively correlated. As GDP rises

Today the United States Americans more than ever; there is a constant fear of an awaiting recession due to the economy. The recession in the later 2000’s has been known as the greatest economic decline since the Great Depression. The United States of America, the banks and businesses are not able to succeed and are failing due to the market. Many people across America cannot afford their homes or bills due to the unemployment rate that seems to keep increasing. Many people blame this on the higher oil or gas prices, and the wars that the United States acts on. The recession has overall declined our economic activity in business profits, employment, and investment. This is all due to our falling market, and the rise of prices that so many Americans cannot afford.

A macroeconomic policy is known at the government’s regulations to control or stimulate aggregate indicators for the economy. In other words, these are policies that focus on providing solutions to help stimulate economic growth and fight financial situations; in this case the recession. The macroeconomic policy that would be a legitimate solution to the recession would be Fiscal Policy, but more specifically, Expansionary Fiscal Policy. The reason why this would be a legitimate solution is because unlike Expansionary Monetary Policy, it has a more direct effect on aggregate demand. In other words, the government will aim to increase how much money is spent in order to stimulate aggregate demand. Furthermore, potential tax cuts will serve as a catalyst for spiking aggregate demand by granting people the capability to consume and invest (Forsythe, 2012). As an ultimate effect, the recession that America is going through will show more direct signs of economic growth, and will not have much of an influence in sparking inflation in the long

A recession is characterised by a period of at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. During a recession, demand and supply of goods and services in the economy contracts. The UK economy contracted by 1.5% in the last quarter of 2008 and the Gross Domestic Product experienced its biggest fall since the second quarter of 1980 (Kowelle 2009). This is the first time since the inception of the NMW that employment has fallen. Unemployment is rapidly on the increase.

According to the financial definition, a recession is a significant decline in activity spread across the economy, lasting longer than a few months. It is visible in industrial production, employment, real income, and wholesale-retail trade. The technical indicator of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as measured by a country's GDP. (Dictionary.com) A less official and more realistic definition of an economic recession is the social perception of the state of the economy at a given time. The collective beliefs of the public, mainly businesses and consumers, drive the social perception of whether things are seen as positive or negative. Unfortunately

The Great Recession, December 2007 through June2009 marks an unstable 18 months for the United States’ economy, that countless amounts of people won’t forget. The housing and bank markets during the recession were not recouping much money off loans and low interest rates, which cause both markets to nearly crash. This caused many Americans to lose their jobs and the unemployment rates to reach the highest numbers since the Great Depression. But ever since 2009, the economy has been an on slow but steady track up to being what it once was.

A budgetary stimulus is a necessity to help avoid recessions. Fiscal policy is when a government adjusts its’ spending levels and tax rates in order to impact the nation’s economic status. It is linked to the monetary policy which involves a bank and affects the nation’s money source. When there is an increase in unemployment and the economy is soon reaching a recession, the fiscal policy will help maintain the economy. The fiscal policy will decrease taxes and widely promote government spending. On the other hand, when unemployment is declining and prices are escalating, the policy will reduce government spending and raise the prices on taxes. The Great Recession was a horrific economic crisis that led businesses and buyers to drastically

The 2008 Great Recession helped in restoring economic growth and lowered unemployment. Both fiscal and monetary policies are related ways use to increase the aggregate demand and aggregate supply. So, a shift in the aggregate demand curve to the right is expansionary fiscal policy meaning government spending has to exceed (2012). The G- component aggregate demand help to spend, allowing the C- component of aggregate demand to increase. On the other hand, the monetary policy promotes spending, investments, and lending increasing aggregate demand. During the downturn, the systems concentrate on growing demand total while the supply strategy looked for long-term growth in productivity and efficiency (Pettinger, 2012).

December 2007, a recession happened again in the United States; this lasted until June 2009. In between the years of 1948 to 2011, there have been 10 recessions total.(U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012) The government used a policy called the Fiscal policy which was a starting point of the recovery after the most current recession in 2007. The fiscal policy includes government spending, taxation, and other factors that influence the economy. President Obama was trying to increase aggregate demand by using the Fiscal policy. Aggregate demand is a relationship between the price level and the output of goods as well as services.

Recession cycles are thought to be a normal part of living in a world of inexact balances between supply and demand. What turns a usually mild and short recession or "ordinary" business cycle into an actual depression is a subject of debate and concern. Scholars have not agreed on the exact causes and their relative importance. The search for causes is closely connected to the question of how to avoid a future depression, and so the political and policy viewpoints of scholars are mixed into the analysis of historic events eight decades ago. The even larger question is whether it was largely a failure on the part of free markets or largely a failure on the part of government efforts to regulate interest rates, curtail widespread bank failures, and control the money supply. Those who believe in a large role for the state in the economy believe it was mostly a failure of the free markets and those who believe in free markets believe it was mostly a failure of government that compounded the problem.

The fiscal and Monetary step taken in the last 18 months by the U.S. Federal Reserve, The U.S. Treasury Dept., The U.S. congress and the Presidents Bush and Obama were to help stabilize the U.S. economy.

During the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the U.S. economy experienced one of the most difficult effects of a recession since the Great Depression. In reviewing the causes of both economic downfalls, it can be seen that there were several factors in common that helped cause the recession for each era.