In our previous post, we documented the changes in the “big three” macroeconomic variables—the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, and the real GDP growth rate—in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But macroeconomics is more than simply measuring variables. In this post, we use the AS-AD model to … Continue reading Putting the Macro Pieces Together

You’ve probably heard that the COVID-19 pandemic is “bad for the economy,” but what does that claim mean? In this blog post, we review the “big three” macroeconomic variables and show the effects of the global pandemic on them in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. Are we in a recession? A recession is … Continue reading COVID-19 and Macro-3

The COVID-19 pandemic was having a devastating effect on the U.S. economy in the second quarter of 2020, but its effects were already visible in the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) report of U.S. GDP in the first quarter. Real GDP decreased and the price level rose. In this post, we explain what happened using … Continue reading Aggregate Effects of COVID-19 on the U.S. Economy