A Tale of Two Recoveries, 2009-2021

Monday, November 15 at 4:00 PM

Join us in person at Rowling Hall, RRH 4.408

The 2020 pandemic recession was both the steepest economic contraction and rebound in U.S. history, and the shortest recession on record. In contrast, the recovery from the preceding recession of 2007-09 was the slowest in postwar U.S. history, with investment, productivity, and real incomes only exhibiting signs of full recovery in 2018-19. In these remarks, former Acting Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Tyler Goodspeed reflects on the economic policy response to the pandemic recession, as well as the economic policies that contributed to unprecedented real income gains on the eve of the COVID shock.

Dr. Tyler Goodspeed is the Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2020-21 he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President, having previously served as Member, Chief Economist for Macroeconomic Policy, and Senior Economist for public finance and macroeconomics. Before joining the Council, he was a Junior Fellow in Economics at the University of Oxford, and Lecturer in Economics at King’s College London. His primary research and teaching fields are economic history and monetary economics, with secondary interests in macroeconomics and political economy. Prior to earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014, he received his A.B. from Harvard, summa cum laude, in 2008, and from 2008-2009 was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. 

Goodspeed’s second book, Legislating Instability, examines the effects of unlimited liability and regulatory capture on financial stability in “free banking” Scotland.  He also has a recent book, Famine and Finance, on the market for small loans during the Great Famine of Ireland, as well as companion articles in the Journal of Development Economics and World Bank Economic Review.  Tyler’s current research focuses on British and North American economic history, with particular attention to informal banking and the political economy of financial regulation, as well as long-run economic development.  Previously, in his first book, Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution, he analyzed the debates between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, considering the relevance of those debates to contemporary monetary economics.  He is also an avid distance runner.