Long-term real growth in US GDP 1871-2009

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Bubbles, History of the United States, VE Infographics

This time I am plotting United States GDP as a comparison to my first graph US Stock Market Growth since 1871 in this series. You will notice that the 2009 US GDP dropped to 2005-2006 levels as a result of the recent financial crises.

Log scale version coming tomorrow.

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Tagged as: Bubbles, GDP, Line Graph, United States

Mebane Faber

This chat would be much more useful if the Y-Axis was log.

Keep up the great work Catherine, love the charts!
http://jacobrideout.net Jacob Rideout

Great work! I’d very much like to see this on a per-capita adjusted basis. There seems to be a very good exponential fit, but is that due an exponential growth in GDP (per capita) or a growth in population. I know we’ve had real growth in wealth per capita over this timeframe, but what does that trend looklike? I also wonder how that would compare to median household income over the same timeframe.
s

A few problems. I don’t think you can call stock rises, adjusted by the CPI, “Real”. The CPI is garbage. It’s an arbitrary basket, with items chosen by economists on political payrolls. Since true inflation is simply defined as the increase in the money supply (not “prices going up”, a dishonest and half-hearted definition), looking at the M1/M3 statistics from the Federal Reserve website paints a different story. If stock changes were adjusted for by the actual changes in circulated currency, the long term performance of the S&P index would look as mediocre as it really was, in terms of purchasing power. The exponential function you’re seeing in this chart is the Federal Reserve’s printing press, not adjusted for.