Significant Differences, Erie Similarities The U.S. business cycle has entered its boom phase. This is a period that typically comes closer to the end of the cycle, just prior to a recession. It is characterized by robust economic growth, tightening labor and product markets, intensifying wage and price pressures, monetary tightening, and higher interest rates.
Another feature of the boom phase of a business cycle is excessive risk-taking somewhere in the financial system. This fuels the boom and is eventually at the center of the subsequent bust. Subprime mortgage loans were the obvious culprit a decade ago, runaway internet stocks that pumped up a stock market bubble were the problem in the early-2000s recession, and the savings and loan crisis incited the early 1990s downturn.
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
