This dataset includes various economic indicators such as stock market performance, inflation rates, GDP, interest rates, employment data, and housing index, all of which are crucial for understanding the state of the economy. By analysing this dataset, one can gain insights into the causes and effects of past recessions in the US, which can inform investment decisions and policy-making.

There are 20 columns and 343 rows spanning 1990-04 to 2022-10

The columns are:

1. Price: Price column refers to the S&P 500 lot price over the years. The S&P 500 is a stock market index that measures the performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. This variable represents the value of the S&P 500 index from 1980 to present. Industrial Production: This variable measures the output of industrial establishments in the manufacturing, mining, and utilities sectors. It reflects the overall health of the manufacturing industry, which is a key component of the US economy.

2. INDPRO: Industrial production measures the output of the manufacturing, mining, and utility sectors of the economy. It provides insights into the overall health of the economy, as a decline in industrial production can indicate a slowdown in economic activity. This data can be used by policymakers and investors to assess the state of the economy and make informed decisions.

3. CPI: CPI stands for Consumer Price Index, which measures the change in the prices of a basket of goods and services that consumers purchase. CPI inflation represents the rate at which the prices of goods and services in the economy are increasing.

4. Treasure Bill rate (3 month to 30 Years): Treasury bills (T-bills) are short-term debt securities issued by the US government. This variable represents the interest rates on T-bills with maturities ranging from 3 months to 30 years. It reflects the cost of borrowing money for the government and provides an indication of the overall level of interest rates in the economy.

5. GDP: GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product, which is the value of all goods and services produced in a country. This dataset is taking into account only the Nominal GDP values. Nominal GDP represents the total value of goods and services produced in the US economy without accounting for inflation.

6. Rate: The Federal Funds Rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions lend reserve balances to other depository institutions overnight. It is set by the Federal Reserve and is used as a tool to regulate the money supply in the economy.

7. BBK_Index: The BBKI are maintained and produced by the Indiana Business Research Center at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. The BBK Coincident and Leading Indexes and Monthly GDP Growth for the U.S. are constructed from a collapsed dynamic factor analysis of a panel of 490 monthly measures of real economic activity and quarterly real GDP growth. The BBK Leading Index is the leading subcomponent of the cycle measured in standard deviation units from trend real GDP growth.

8. Housing Index: This variable represents the value of the housing market in the US. It is calculated based on the prices of homes sold in the market and provides an indication of the overall health of the housing market.

9. Recession binary column: This variable is a binary indicator that takes a value of 1 when the US economy is in a recession and 0 otherwise. It is based on the official business cycle dates provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

During the period beginning roughly in the mid-1980s until the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008), the U.S. economy experienced a time of relative economic calm, with low inflation and consistent GDP growth. Compared with the turbulent economic era which had preceded it in the 1970s and the early 1980s, the lack of extreme fluctuations in the business cycle led some commentators to suggest that macroeconomic issues such as high inflation, long-term unemployment and financial crises were a thing of the past. Indeed, the President of the American Economic Association, Professor Robert Lucas, famously proclaimed in 2003 that "central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes". Ben Bernanke, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient, coined the term 'the Great Moderation' to describe this era of newfound economic confidence. The era came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the GFC in the Summer of 2007, as the U.S. financial system began to crash due to a downturn in the real estate market.

Causes of the Great Moderation, and its downfall

A number of factors have been cited as contributing to the Great Moderation including central bank monetary policies, the shift from manufacturing to services in the economy, improvements in information technology and management practices, as well as reduced energy prices. The period coincided with the term of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), famous for the 'Greenspan put', a policy which meant that the Fed would proactively address downturns in the stock market using its monetary policy tools. These economic factors came to prominence at the same time as the end of the Cold War (1947-1991), with the U.S. attaining a new level of hegemony in global politics, as its main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. During the Great Moderation, the U.S. experienced a recession twice, between July 1990 and March 1991, and again from March 2001 tom November 2001, however, these relatively short recessions did not knock the U.S. off its growth path. The build up of household and corporate debt over the early 2000s eventually led to the Global Financial Crisis, as the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2007 reverberated across the financial system, with a subsequent credit freeze and mass defaults.

According to a survey conducted in August 2024, over ** percent of consumers in the United States believed both inflation and a pending recession would impact their Halloween spending plans. About the same number of people said these economic changes would not influence their spending.

IBISWorld examines the potentially significant effects of a global recession on domestic industries, businesses and consumers.

Graph and download economic data for Real-time Sahm Rule Recession Indicator (SAHMREALTIME) from Dec 1959 to Sep 2025 about recession indicators, academic data, and USA.

Graph and download economic data for Dates of U.S. recessions as inferred by GDP-based recession indicator (JHDUSRGDPBR) from Q4 1967 to Q1 2025 about recession indicators, GDP, and USA.

In this Commentary, we show that realized wage growth since 2015 has mostly been at a rate that would be expected given observed rates of inflation and labor productivity growth. Moreover, labor productivity growth has been in line with its potential over the same period. This picture of the post-recession recovery of wages is very different from the one we observed in an earlier analysis, when all we had were data up through the end of 2015. The reasons underlying the difference are large revisions in labor productivity data and upticks in the inflation rate and labor productivity growth since our last report.

Inflation is generally defined as the continued increase in the average prices of goods and services in a given region. Following the extremely high global inflation experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, global inflation has been relatively stable since the turn of the millennium, usually hovering between three and five percent per year. There was a sharp increase in 2008 due to the global financial crisis now known as the Great Recession, but inflation was fairly stable throughout the 2010s, before the current inflation crisis began in 2021. Recent years Despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the global inflation rate fell to 3.26 percent in the pandemic's first year, before rising to 4.66 percent in 2021. This increase came as the impact of supply chain delays began to take more of an effect on consumer prices, before the Russia-Ukraine war exacerbated this further. A series of compounding issues such as rising energy and food prices, fiscal instability in the wake of the pandemic, and consumer insecurity have created a new global recession, and global inflation in 2024 is estimated to have reached 5.76 percent. This is the highest annual increase in inflation since 1996. Venezuela Venezuela is the country with the highest individual inflation rate in the world, forecast at around 200 percent in 2022. While this is figure is over 100 times larger than the global average in most years, it actually marks a decrease in Venezuela's inflation rate, which had peaked at over 65,000 percent in 2018. Between 2016 and 2021, Venezuela experienced hyperinflation due to the government's excessive spending and printing of money in an attempt to curve its already-high inflation rate, and the wave of migrants that left the country resulted in one of the largest refugee crises in recent years. In addition to its economic problems, political instability and foreign sanctions pose further long-term problems for Venezuela. While hyperinflation may be coming to an end, it remains to be seen how much of an impact this will have on the economy, how living standards will change, and how many refugees may return in the coming years.

The rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate. This paper asks why. Possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation, changes in NAIRU, and other shocks. A change in the persistence of inflation, with inflation more anchored in the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985, is found to be important. The level and change in the NAIRU cannot be precisely estimated, but the data suggest an increase of nearly 1 percentage point since 2007.

The Volcker Shock was a period of historically high interest rates precipitated by Federal Reserve Chairperson Paul Volcker's decision to raise the central bank's key interest rate, the Fed funds effective rate, during the first three years of his term. Volcker was appointed chairperson of the Fed in August 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, as replacement for William Miller, who Carter had made his treasury secretary. Volcker was one of the most hawkish (supportive of tighter monetary policy to stem inflation) members of the Federal Reserve's committee, and quickly set about changing the course of monetary policy in the U.S. in order to quell inflation. The Volcker Shock is remembered for bringing an end to over a decade of high inflation in the United States, prompting a deep recession and high unemployment, and for spurring on debt defaults among developing countries in Latin America who had borrowed in U.S. dollars.

Monetary tightening and the recessions of the early '80s

Beginning in October 1979, Volcker's Fed tightened monetary policy by raising interest rates. This decision had the effect of depressing demand and slowing down the U.S. economy, as credit became more expensive for households and businesses. The Fed funds rate, the key overnight rate at which banks lend their excess reserves to each other, rose as high as 17.6 percent in early 1980. The rate was allowed to fall back below 10 percent following this first peak, however, due to worries that inflation was not falling fast enough, a second cycle of monetary tightening was embarked upon starting in August of 1980. The rate would reach its all-time peak in June of 1981, at 19.1 percent. The second recession sparked by these hikes was far deeper than the 1980 recession, with unemployment peaking at 10.8 percent in December 1980, the highest level since The Great Depression. This recession would drive inflation to a low point during Volcker's terms of 2.5 percent in August 1983.

The legacy of the Volcker Shock

By the end of Volcker's terms as Fed Chair, inflation was at a manageable rate of around four percent, while unemployment had fallen under six percent, as the economy grew and business confidence returned. While supporters of Volcker's actions point to these numbers as proof of the efficacy of his actions, critics have claimed that there were less harmful ways that inflation could have been brought under control. The recessions of the early 1980s are cited as accelerating deindustrialization in the U.S., as manufacturing jobs lost in 'rust belt' states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania never returned during the years of recovery. The Volcker Shock was also a driving factor behind the Latin American debt crises of the 1980s, as governments in the region defaulted on debts which they had incurred in U.S. dollars. Debates about the validity of using interest rate hikes to get inflation under control have recently re-emerged due to the inflationary pressures facing the U.S. following the Coronavirus pandemic and the Federal Reserve's subsequent decision to embark on a course of monetary tightening.

By April 2026, it is projected that there is a probability of ***** percent that the United States will fall into another economic recession. This reflects a significant decrease from the projection of the preceding month.

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price rigidities, no nominal rigidities in wages, and a binding zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate. Our model does a good job of accounting for the joint behavior of labor and goods markets, as well as inflation, during the Great Recession. According to the model the observed fall in total factor productivity and the rise in the cost of working capital played critical roles in accounting for the small drop in inflation that occurred during the Great Recession. (JEL E12, E23, E24, E31, E32, E52)

Some analysts and economists recently warned that the United States economy faces a much higher risk of recession should the price of oil rise to $100 per barrel or more. In February 2008, spot crude oil prices closed above $100 per barrel for the first time ever, and since then they have climbed even higher. Meanwhile, according to some surveys of economists, it is highly probable that a recession began in the United States in late 2007 or early 2008. Although the findings in this paper are consistent with the view that the United States economy has become much less sensitive to large changes in oil prices, a simple forecasting exercise using Hamilton's model augmented with the first principal component of 85 macroeconomic variables reveals that a permanent increase in the price of crude oil to $150 per barrel by the end of 2008 could have a significant negative effect on the growth rate of real gross domestic product in the short run. Moreover, the model also predicts that such an increase in oil prices would produce much higher overall and core inflation rates in 2009 than most policymakers expect.

In the December 2022 Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), the median projection for four-quarter core PCE inflation in the fourth quarter of 2025 is 2.1 percent. This same SEP has unemployment rising by nine-tenths, to 4.6 percent, by the end of 2023. We assess the plausibility of this projection using a specific nonlinear model that embeds an empirically successful nonlinear Phillips curve specification into a structural model, identifying it via an underutilized data-dependent method. We model core PCE inflation using three components that align with those noted by Chair Powell in his December 14, 2022, press conference: housing, core goods, and core-services-less-housing. Our model projects that conditional on the SEP unemployment rate path and a rapid deceleration of core goods prices, core PCE inflation moderates to only 2.75 percent by the end of 2025: inflation will be higher for longer. A deep recession would be necessary to achieve the SEP’s projected inflation path. A simple reduced-form welfare analysis, which abstracts from any danger of inflation expectations becoming unanchored, suggests that such a recession would not be optimal.

Stagflation (stagnation and inflation in one word) depicts a time period when an economy is not only suffering from a recession (declining GDP), but high unemployment and inflation rates as well. Usually unemployment and inflation are inversely related, which makes stagflation a rare occurrence. It first happened in the 1970s, when OPEC put an oil embargo on the United States, resulting in oil prices skyrocketing to three times the standard value at that time. As of September 2023, the price of oil fell by 20 percent in comparison to last year after having increased by 76 perent as a result of Russian invasion of Ukraine. The has been signs of stagflation in some countries through 2022 and 2023, but falling inflation rates indicate that the worst has been avoided.

In a New Keynesian model with downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR), we show that government spending is more effective in stimulating output in a low-inflation recession relative to a high-inflation recession. The government spending multiplier is large when DNWR binds, but the nature of recession matters due to the opposing response of inflation, and consequently for real wages. Using U.S. historical time series data, we provide evidence of larger spending multipliers in low inflation recessions and the importance of the depth of recessions. We also employ cross-sectional data from U.S. states to document supporting evidence on multipliers and our proposed mechanism.

Dataset Overview:

This dataset offers a comprehensive time series analysis of three vital economic indicators in the United States: Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Unemployment Rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI). Spanning from January 1974 to January 2024, this dataset provides valuable insights into the U.S. economy over the past five decades, capturing periods of growth, recession, and inflation.

Contents:

• GDP Data (gdp_data.csv): Quarterly data on the Gross Domestic Product, measured in billions of dollars, highlighting economic performance and trends over the years.
• Unemployment Data (unemployment_data.csv): Monthly data on the unemployment rate, showing fluctuations in labor market conditions and workforce participation over time.
• CPI Data (cpi_data.csv): Monthly data on the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), capturing changes in the price level of consumer goods and services and reflecting inflationary trends.

Usage and Applications:

• Economic History Analysis: Examine long-term trends and cycles in U.S. economic performance, including periods of recession and expansion.
• Predictive Modeling: Develop models to forecast future economic conditions based on historical data patterns.
• Policy Impact Studies: Analyze the effects of fiscal and monetary policies on GDP, unemployment, and inflation over time.

Data Sources:

The dataset is sourced from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRED is a comprehensive resource for economic data, widely used by researchers, analysts, and policymakers.

How to Use the Dataset:

• Exploration: Utilize tools like Pandas and Matplotlib in Python to explore and visualize the dataset.
• Time Series Analysis: Apply techniques such as ARIMA, exponential smoothing, and seasonal decomposition to analyze trends and seasonality.
• Comparative Studies: Compare economic performance across different decades and investigate interactions between GDP, unemployment, and CPI.

Note: This dataset is intended for educational and research purposes. Users are encouraged to cite the original data source (FRED) when using this dataset in publications or presentations.

Does the flatter Phillips curve really imply that the relationship between inflation and economic activity has weakened? This Economic Commentary revisits the relationship by focusing on the role of economic growth for inflation dynamics.

Expectations shaped by monetary policy kept inflation stable during the Great Recession despite disinflationary pressure from high unemployment.

We use the yield curve to predict future GDP growth and recession probabilities. The spread between short- and long-term rates typically correlates with economic growth. Predications are calculated using a model developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Released monthly.