The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Economy

I was playing around with some GDP data and came up with this chart. This shows U.S. Real GDP divided by a trendline growing at 3.2%.

In short, when the line is rising, that means that the U.S. economy grew faster than 3.2%. When it’s falling, it grew slower than 3.2%.

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It’s hard to see a precise trend in this data, but it appears to vaguely form an arc. The economy grew very strongly from 1949 to 1966. Over the next 40 years, growth trended at 3.2% (with some notable dips). Since then, growth has been far below the trend.

Posted by on August 5th, 2014 at 12:10 pm


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