Investors and analysts are blaming the global economic crisis on a small-scale market crash and not the U.S. market crash of 1929.
But a new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) finds that the “crash was far more severe than many had initially feared.”
The report, released Thursday, also says that the stock market has recovered since the crisis began.
“In the short term, the financial crisis has caused some short-term gains, but the recovery from 1929 was not strong enough to offset the severe impact of the crash on the broader economy,” the CRFB report said.
The report found that the global economy was growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% in 2015, but that it had contracted by 0.4% in 2016.
And while there were “a number of factors that contributed to the recession,” it noted that the collapse in oil prices in 2014 “was likely the most important” one, as it resulted in a global recession that was exacerbated by the Fed’s $1.2 trillion in QE3 stimulus.
The CRFB found that it’s not just the economy that’s affected by the financial crash, as the economy also suffered during the recession.
“During the financial collapse, economic output was down 5.6% in the first quarter of 2020, the second-largest drop in two years.
The Great Recession had a major impact on jobs, wages, and incomes,” the report said, adding that “the economy was also weakened by the global recession.”
While the report noted that this was not the first time the global financial crisis had impacted the economy, it said that “as the global crisis worsened, the U,S.
economy began to experience an even more severe recession.”
The report also found that there were two different sets of “significant shocks” to the economy.
The first was the global slowdown in 2015 and 2016, which contributed to a $1 trillion in additional QE spending.
But the second was the “great recession,” which was caused by the collapse of oil prices and resulted in the largest decline in GDP in two decades.
“This was an economy that was already in decline, but it was in such bad shape that the crisis in oil pricing in 2014, combined with the global collapse in real GDP in 2015/16, caused a significant drag on the economy,” it said.
While the “economic recovery is not strong, the recession is still deep, and there are still some big holes to be filled in the economy” in the coming months, it noted.