Epoch Times - Is America in a New Period of Economic Growth? | Mark Skousen
Aired: 2025-08-12
Duration: 02:17


=== Avoided Recession (02:16) ===

[00:00:00]  Well, I've been a reluctant bull.
[00:00:02]  I'm fully invested in the stock market.
[00:00:04]  Stock market is also suggesting that the economy is doing really well despite the efforts by the Fed to keep interest rates high.
[00:00:14]  And, you know, the whole issue on the trade and how that's going to affect production and productivity and that sort of thing.
[00:00:23]  So I've been a skeptic, and so I am, I have to admit, I'm surprised by the data.
[00:00:29]  The data's been looking good in the last few months.
[00:00:32]  We've avoided a recession that most economists had been predicting because of the tight money policy.
[00:00:39]  After easy money, usually you have a boom bust, and there's been no bust.
[00:00:44]  So maybe Trump is doing the right thing in so many ways, especially in the tax bill, which I think gave a lot of incentives.
[00:00:54]  And also in the tariff wars, you're seeing a lot of money moving back into the U.S. Although the dollar's been weak, so it's really hard.
[00:01:02]  You have these mixed signals that are going out there to some extent.
[00:01:06]  But on that balance, things look pretty positive.
[00:01:09]  For almost over a year, business spending, business investment, if you look at the breakdown of GDP, gross domestic product, you can see that consumption has been growing rapidly.
[00:01:24]  Government spending has been growing rapidly.
[00:01:26]  But business has been tepid.
[00:01:28]  And there was actually a recession there last year.
[00:01:31]  It was a mild recession in business spending.
[00:01:34]  And business spending is the key to economic growth.
[00:01:37]  And I've tried to demonstrate that with my gross output statistic.
[00:01:41]  So that's why I was worried in my last press release on gross output.
[00:01:48]  It was growing at a very slow pace.
[00:01:51]  But that seems to have changed.
[00:01:53]  And as an economist, it's extremely important to look at the data rather than just on a theoretical basis, we should be in a recession.
[00:02:02]  Well, we're not in a recession.
[00:02:04]  It looks like we're coming out of slow growth, which is really important.
[00:02:08]  I'll go back to Ronald Reagan.
[00:02:10]  You know, in 1983, the real GDP grew over 8% under Reagan.