The Great Moderation: inflation and real GDP growth in the U.S. 1985-2007

During the period beginning roughly in the mid-1980s until the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008), the U.S. economy experienced a time of relative economic calm, with low inflation and consistent GDP growth. Compared with the turbulent economic era which had preceded it in the 1970s and the early 1980s, the lack of extreme fluctuations in the business cycle led some commentators to suggest that macroeconomic issues such as high inflation, long-term unemployment and financial crises were a thing of the past. Indeed, the President of the American Economic Association, Professor Robert Lucas, famously proclaimed in 2003 that "central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes". Ben Bernanke, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient, coined the term 'the Great Moderation' to describe this era of newfound economic confidence. The era came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the GFC in the Summer of 2007, as the U.S. financial system began to crash due to a downturn in the real estate market.

Causes of the Great Moderation, and its downfall

A number of factors have been cited as contributing to the Great Moderation including central bank monetary policies, the shift from manufacturing to services in the economy, improvements in information technology and management practices, as well as reduced energy prices. The period coincided with the term of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), famous for the 'Greenspan put', a policy which meant that the Fed would proactively address downturns in the stock market using its monetary policy tools. These economic factors came to prominence at the same time as the end of the Cold War (1947-1991), with the U.S. attaining a new level of hegemony in global politics, as its main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. During the Great Moderation, the U.S. experienced a recession twice, between July 1990 and March 1991, and again from March 2001 tom November 2001, however, these relatively short recessions did not knock the U.S. off its growth path. The build up of household and corporate debt over the early 2000s eventually led to the Global Financial Crisis, as the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2007 reverberated across the financial system, with a subsequent credit freeze and mass defaults.