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Critique of Not your father’s Recovery?

            “Not Your Father’s Recovery?”written by Kenneth R. Beauchemin, was published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 2010. The article is outstanding for its certain data processing, good organization and comprehensive usage of illustrative graphs. Though very impressive, the article would have been more persuasive and competent if it had made more proof of the cause of Great Recession and had made more certain dates in the graph.

            As for the article’s organization, it is not hard for the audience to follow the authors’ core train of thought and know the main ideas since there are a lot of key sentences distributed all over the paragraphs indicating the topic sentences. For example, we can find sentences, “If all goes according to the usual business-cycle dating procedures, a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) will soon convene to declare that what has come to be known as the “Great Recession” came to an end in June 2009 (Kenneth R. Beauchemin, page 1). At the beginning of the first paragraph of the introduction, “The Comparison is made using a scaled-down version of the sophisticated and powerful models that real forecasters actually use. Applying it to real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, unemployment, inflation, and the federal funds rate suggests that the recovery looks consistent with past recoveries-at least so far.” (Kenneth R. Beauchemin, page 2) With these sentences, we may already have a general idea about the article’s thesis, not to mention other helpful sentences at the beginning of each paragraph.

            What makes the article more consequential is that the author provided certain data processing. To analyze the Great Recessions impact on economics, the authors set some real dates. Especially in the second part of the article, the authors skillfully used four real data examples to illustrate and emphasize their conclusions. There are realGDP, Core PCE (Personal consumption expenditures price index) inflation, Unemployment rate and Federal Funds rate respectively, that is, using the Vector-Autoregression (VAR) model to forecast the real data can totally help people know what we will do in the future, also know what the trend is we would face.

            Another aspect of the article that impresses me profoundly is that there are many clear and illustrative graphs. In the first part, the article explained the severity of the Recession and the Strength of Recovery, such as, the percentage peak-to-trough decline. Then the author made the real GDP as an example to improve the point. Next the authors told about Implications for realGDP, Core PCE inflation, Unemployment rate and Federal Funds rate. In the last part of the article, the authors made a conclusion the whole article. The author using the illustrative graphs to appeared what happened was for these indexes.  

            However, throughout the article, there is an little detail concerning the data processing in the Forecast Date. The article mainly introduced the meaning of words. It only briefly used notation and formulation, also without specific demonstration in a statistical way. Thus, if the author add these parts into the article, it would be better than now.

            All in all, the article is extraordinary, because there is a certain data processing in it, good organization and comprehensive usage of illustrative graphs. However, it would have been more successful if it has some detailed information of the data processing in the Forecast Date to support the author’ opinions.

Reference:

Kenneth, R..B. (2010, Sept). Economic Commentary. Not Your Father’s Recovery? Retrieved from http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2010/2010-12.cfm