The economic expansion in the US since 2009 and Donald Trump’s ambitions to ‘drain the swamp’
Trevor Evans
Additional contact information
Trevor Evans: Institute for International Political Economy, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany
European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention, 2018, vol. 15, issue 1, 12-31
Abstract:
Since the prolonged recession in 1980–1982 which laid the basis for the emergence of finance-led capitalism in the US there have been four phases of economic expansion. The first three ended with increasingly severe recessions in 1990–1991, 2001 and 2007–2009. The most recent expansion, which began in mid 2009, has been characterised by relatively low growth and investment has been weaker than in previous expansions. Unemployment has fallen sharply, but many of the new jobs have been in low-paid services. The Trump government’s much-touted investment programme is dependent on mobilising private funding but this has not yet been very forthcoming. Moves to relax the tighter banking regulations introduced in 2010, while strongly welcomed by the big banks, have been widely criticised. Key indicators of financial tensions are unusually low, but profitability and investment, which usually serve as leading indicators of the business cycle, have begun to decline and this suggests that the current expansion could be approaching an end.
Keywords: US economy; profitability; finance; wages; business cycle; crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E25 E32 E44 E58 E65 F44 G01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/ejeep/15-1/ejeep.2018.01.02.xml (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:ejeepi:v:15:y:2018:i:1:p12-31
Access Statistics for this article
European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention is currently edited by Torsten Niechoj
More articles in European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Phillip Thompson ().