History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Or so the saying goes. Sometimes history indeed repeats. Our latest example: how the distribution of growth across the U.S. is strikingly similar to what took place in the mid-1980s, which is the last time the country grappled with fallout from a supply-driven plunge in oil prices. The Philadelphia Fed uses four variables (non-farm payrolls, average hours worked in manufacturing, real wages, and unemployment rate) to produce a monthly coincident activity index for each state. Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research, compared the annual change in each state’s coincident activity index in December 2015 with those in December 1986 to get a sense of how analogous the distribution of growth has been. His results show that, by and large, the winners in 2015 were also the winners in 1986: Renaissance Macro Research “Basically, the idea is that a […]