History
A U.S. GDP spine with the shocks, policy turns, crises, and resets that changed the macro path.
Trend Map
A GDP spine with the shocks, wars, policy turns, crises, and inflation resets that bent the U.S. macro path.
Episodes
Episode Detail
The episodes in this span open the fuller context, indicators, and nearby turns.
A Useful Bend in the Story
A break in the story often makes the rest easier to read. The links below each episode open the data, concepts, and model layers tied to that turn.
Episode List
Open any episode directly from the list if you want the full context without hunting for a year marker on the chart.
The 1929 crash turned a financial break into a long macro collapse. Output, prices, employment, and credit all moved the wrong way together.
Emergency banking action, deposit protection, and broader federal intervention changed the floor beneath the system.
Modeling stops being only diagrammatic and starts becoming quantitative. Tinbergen’s 1936 national model is the first clear milestone in that shift.
The economy moved from depression-era slack into full mobilization. Fiscal demand, industrial capacity, and labor absorption all surged together.
Postwar macro stops being only about demand support. It also becomes a story about monetary credibility and the boundary between fiscal needs and rate policy.
Rising productivity, broad consumer demand, and industrial depth make steady expansion look normal rather than exceptional.
The simple inflation-unemployment tradeoff stops looking permanent once expectations enter the story. That is the core model shift attached to 1968.
The early 1970s rearrange the monetary backdrop. Exchange-rate rigidity weakens, inflation pressure builds, and policy coordination gets harder.
By 1976 the objection is no longer only about one Phillips curve. It is about the whole practice of using historical correlations to predict new policy regimes.
The late-1970s inflation fight is where policy credibility becomes concrete: higher rates, weaker demand, and a deliberate recession to reset expectations.
The 1987 crash does not become a 1930s-style macro collapse, but it proves that market structure and financial feedback can move much faster than the real economy.
The 1980s and 1990s are the decades in which microfounded DSGE models become the dominant way to formalize policy and business-cycle questions.
The period combines real productivity optimism with financial exuberance. The result is a genuine growth story wrapped in a fragile market narrative.
Housing, leverage, and funding markets feed into a broad output collapse. Finance stops being a side channel and becomes central to the macro story again.
The 2020 stop is unique in speed. Output drops, labor dislocates, policy responds at scale, and the reopening creates its own new imbalances.
The post-pandemic phase combines demand strength, supply bottlenecks, and aggressive rate tightening. Inflation becomes a live transmission story again rather than a memory from textbooks.
