The History of U.S. Recessions and Banking Crises

I have never been entirely satisfied with how either economists or historians identify and date past U.S. recessions and banking crises. Economists, as their studies go further back in time, have a tendency to rely on highly unreliable data series that exaggerate the number of recessions and panics, something most strikingly but not exclusively documented in the notable work of Christina Romer (1986b, 1989, 2009). Historians, on the other hand, relying on more anecdotal and less quantitative evidence, tend to exaggerate the duration and severity of recessions. So I have created a revised chronology in the table below. From the nineteenth century to the present, it distinguishes between three types of events: major recessions, bank panics, and periods of bank failures. I have tried to integrate the best of the approaches of both economists and historians, using them to cross check each other. My chronology therefore differs in important ways from prior lists. One of the table’s benefits is that it gives a visual presentation of which recessions were accompanied by bank panics and which were not. Equally important, it distinguishes between bank panics and periods of significant numbers of bank failures. These two categories are often confused or conflated, and yet this distinction is critical. Not all bank panics (periods of contagious runs and sometimes bank suspensions) were accompanied by numerous bank failures, nor were all periods of numerous failures accompanied by pan...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs