The Fed traditionally restricts itself to managing the “business cycle”—fluctuations of output around a supposed long-term upward trend. Summers questions the very existence of a business cycle, an inherently optimistic concept implying that what goes down must come up. When output declines, his research shows, it never quite gets back to its original trajectory. Productive capacity suffers lasting damage, in part because laid-off workers lose skills.
in a dream i read it's not cyclical at all, it's chaos; i wonder if business cycles and consumer spending should be thrown into the chaos heap, or most likely many have already.
