A year after I posted the “with and without stimulus” economist projection, it’s interesting to see how things have actually panned out.
What expert economists said they expected:
You can see that the projection was that we’d peak at around 8% unemployment, with the stimulus that was proposed. A much smaller stimulus was put into place, and it peaked about 10% instead. But, the projections also said we’d see see a plateau and reduction in unemployment right around the beginning of 2010, and we did. So, it’s been a bit worse than projected, but it’s turning around right on schedule. Of course, it’s still too early to see if this plateau is done and we’re actually recovering, or if we’re just going to plateau until the end of 2010, which would be what was projected to happen without any government intervention. That would suck.
[…] January of 2010, I posted the followup, which was cautiously optimistic, while pointing out that unemployment was actually at 10%, but did […]