‘Recession’ Review: A Series of Unfortunate Economic Events

In their efforts to explain downturns, economists tend to connect unrelated data and occurrences. How forecastable are recessions?

By Diana Furchtgott-Roth. She reviewed the book Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It by Tyler Goodspeed.

Furchtgott-Roth is a Distinguished Fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. 

Goodspeed is a former acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers who is now ExxonMobil’s chief economist.

Excerpts:

"As early as 1662, the physician and statistician William Petty asserted a cycle of “dearths and plenties” every seven years. In the 20th century, Nikolai Kondratiev had his “long waves.” Simon Kuznets believed in “secondary secular movements” or “long swings” linked to population and capital formation. Joseph Schumpeter held that creative destruction, in response to new technology, created economic swings. And Friedrich Hayek suggested that recessions occur regularly, as maladjustments build up from misguided interest-rate policies."

"“Recessions are fundamentally unforecastable,” writes Mr. Goodspeed"

"recessions don’t cleanse or restructure economies, the way wildfires clear forests of their dead wood. W​hen one examines statistical deviations from trend for output and employment, ​economies look similar before and after recessions, ​​and he sees little support for the Schumpeterian creative-destruction hypothesis. Recessions such as the Great Depression aren’t punishment for the excess of the Roaring ’20s, but interruptions."

"the timing, cause and depth of recessions may be attributable to a series of unfortunate events"

"the apparent business cycles that economists have spent careers documenting are “apophanies” rather than epiphanies: illusions of pattern imposed on noise."

"recessions are generally characterized by a confluence of overlapping and often interacting factors"

"“History simply offers a warning,” Mr. Goodspeed writes, “that we cannot look to the state to arrest episodes of economic contraction ex post, let alone to prevent them ex ante, except in both instances by way of the Hippocratic advice to first do no harm.”"

"The author organizes shocks into three categories"

"Acts of God are environmental: droughts, floods, locust plagues and the unusual winters"

"government-caused disruptions, such as Fed Chairman’s Paul Volcker’s move to raise interest rates to almost 20% at the same time as the federal government imposed credit controls, causing the 1980 recession"

"Acts of Man are human-made but not policy-driven, including frauds such as Edwin Ludlow’s misappropriation of funds from the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Co. in 1857, or the savings-and-loan failures in the mid-1980s." 

"Mr. Goodspeed rarely finds recessions caused by a single one of these shocks"

"the frequency of recessions doesn’t determine the fate of an economy. Since 1945, Britain has had a 6% annual probability of entering recession, while the U.S. has had a 15% annual probability. Yet Britain’s gross domestic product per capita, which was 70% of that of the U.S. in 1970, has now declined to less than 60%."

"In 1914 America had 27,000 banks, 95% of them with only a single location. Interstate banking was not substantially allowed in the U.S. until the 1990s. This inability to spread risk made U.S. banks, and the economy they served, inherently fragile, with a financial infrastructure prone to amplifying shocks rather than absorbing them."

[there were] "two-cent taxes on bank checks that contracted the money supply by 12% during the Great Depression"

"what people thought was a financial shock in 2008 was also linked to energy and fertilizer. “As the cost of energy soared, so too did the price of highly energy-intensive fertilizer,” he writes. “By the time Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, nitrogenous fertilizer prices had jumped by an unprecedented 86 percent year over year.” This caused ammonia prices to double, and food inflation exceeded 6% in the fall of 2008."

Related posts:

Monetary Policy and the Great Crash of 1929: A Bursting Bubble or Collapsing Fundamentals? (By Timothy Cogley of New York University) 

What Causes Recessions? What Do Recessions Look Like? (by Scott A. Wolla of the St. Louis Federal Reserve bank)

Some Bad News for Good News — Optimistic Forecasts Create Recessions

What ends expansions? (or what causes recessions according to Alan Blinder and Austan Goolsbee)

Are business cycles imbedded in longer cycles called financial cycles?

Ancient Clay Tablets Show Markets Worked 4,000 Years Before Economists Explained Them

Clay tablets unearthed in Asia Minor reveal a sophisticated commercial order emerging spontaneously nearly four thousand years before economists explained how markets work.

By Surse Pierpoint of The American Institute for Economic Research.

"A clay tablet from Kanesh, in what is now central Turkey, contains the founding charter of a twelve-partner trading company. Twelve merchants pooled thirty-three pounds of gold. The document specifies the partners by name, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for any partner who wishes to withdraw early. Pull your share before the term ends and the firm will return silver at a steep discount to the gold you invested. Capital was locked up under prescribed terms.

The tablet is nearly four thousand years old. 

No one had yet written a sentence about markets. The word “capitalism” would not be coined for another 3,800 years. Adam Smith was 3,700 years from picking up his pen. And yet here, baked into clay by a fire that destroyed the building where it was stored (and in doing so preserved it) is a document that any modern private equity attorney would recognize on sight: defined partners, contributed capital, profit-sharing ratios, and a liquidity penalty designed to align the interests of investors with the long-term needs of the enterprise. 

The merchants of Assur, in modern-day Iraq, loaded donkeys with tin and textiles and walked them a thousand kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta, on foot, through terrain that had no roads. Each animal carried about 180 pounds. The journey took two to three months, and yielded silver and gold in return for the trade. 

Archaeologists have recovered more than twenty thousand clay records from Kanesh. Most are business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, correspondence, lawsuits. The economy they reveal is not primitive or embryonic, but teems with complete stories familiar to the modern mind. Partners sued each other in commercial courts. Husbands wrote home about prices. Wives wrote back, noting that the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum lent silver to four different men over nine years, keeping her own records, extending credit on her own terms, building a portfolio of receivables with no bank behind her and no theory to guide her — only prices, trust, and the accumulated discipline of knowing which borrowers repaid. 

People bought other merchants’ loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans. This was not a rough precursor to modern financial instruments — it was a modern financial instrument. Wall Street calls it securitization. The merchants of Assur called it Tuesday. One of the traders got caught smuggling tin in his undergarments to evade a ten percent import tax. 

There was, in other words, a tax. And a smuggler. And an enforcement regime capable of catching him. The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight. 

In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia did something unusual. They took the Kanesh tablet records and ran them through a gravity model — the mathematical framework that modern economists use to predict trade flows between countries based on economic size and geographic distance. The model is a workhorse of contemporary international economics. Its coefficients have been estimated thousands of times using modern data. 

The Bronze Age numbers matched. 

Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate observed between modern nation-states. The relationship between market size and trade volume held. The paper appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is not a venue given to romantic claims about ancient wisdom. It demands identification strategies and careful econometrics. The proposition the paper advanced was this: the fundamental structure of human commercial behavior has not changed in four thousand years. 

This is not a sentimental finding. It is a measurement. The gravity model does not care about ideology or historical narrative. It fits a curve to data, and this curve fit. 

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) spent much of his career trying to explain why centrally designed economic systems fail while spontaneously ordered ones succeed. His answer was the knowledge problem: the information required to coordinate a complex economy is dispersed among millions of actors, embedded in local circumstances, expressed in prices, and impossible to aggregate in any planning bureau. No designer can know what the market knows because the market’s knowledge exists only in the act of exchange itself. 

Hayek was right and received the Nobel Prize in economics. He was also, in a precise sense, describing something that had been running for at least four thousand years before he named it. 

The merchants of Assur did not read Hayek. They had prices, which told them where tin was scarce. They had interest rates, which told them what credit was worth. They had courts, which told them what contracts meant. They had penalties for early withdrawal, which told them that patient capital and impatient capital are different things with different values. They had Ahatum, who told four borrowers what her terms were and kept her own records of who had honored them. 

The system worked not because anyone designed it, but as the residue of thousands of individual decisions by people trying to do better for themselves and their families. It was, in the vocabulary Hayek would eventually give it, spontaneous order. Pushu-ken, one of the Assyrian merchants whose correspondence survives, would have called it simply trade. 

Deirdre McCloskey has argued that the bourgeois virtues — prudence, enterprise, honest dealing, the willingness to truck and barter on agreed terms — produced the modern world. Her argument is not that these virtues were invented in Amsterdam or London, but that there, they were celebrated for the first time. The rhetorical and cultural legitimization of commercial life was the novel event of that period, not the commercial behavior itself. On that point, Kanesh cannot argue. The tablets show the behavior. They do not show a civilization that held its merchants up as an expression of human virtue. 

But they do complicate the explanation. The graph of human welfare is essentially flat from Kanesh to roughly 1750. Four thousand years of merchants practicing every virtue McCloskey names: prudence, honest dealing, contract enforcement, patient capital, and the world did not get meaningfully richer. Something else broke the graph open. McCloskey calls it rhetoric and dignity. Others point to energy density, Atlantic scale, or the dismantling of usury prohibitions. The tablets from Kanesh cannot settle that argument. What they can do is clarify the prior question: whatever the answer, it is not the birth of commerce. Commerce was already ancient when the argument began.

This matters for a reason beyond historical curiosity. 

The recurring argument for managed economies, regulated markets, and designed commercial systems rests on a premise that is rarely stated explicitly but always present: that markets are artifacts, constructed things, instruments of policy that require expert supervision to function and expert correction when they fail. In this view, the market is downstream of theory. Someone had to think it up. Someone has to maintain it. Remove the hand of the designer, and the thing collapses. 

Kanesh is a four-thousand-year refutation of that premise. The courts that enforced Ahatum’s loan contracts were not the creation of a policy commission. The interest rates that told Pushu-ken whether a shipment was worth the risk were not set by a central authority. The early-exit penalty in the founding charter of that twelve-partner company was not mandated by a regulator. These were the spontaneous products of people with things to trade, routes to travel, and enough accumulated experience to know that trust required terms and terms required enforcement. 

When the Harvard and Chicago economists ran the gravity model on the Kanesh data and got modern coefficients, they were not discovering that ancient people were clever. They were discovering that the underlying structure of commercial behavior is not a cultural achievement that can be redesigned. It is closer to a constant. 

Adam Smith described a market that had been running since before his civilization existed. Every argument for designing markets from theory has it exactly backwards. The theory arrived to explain something already there, already working, already generating the surplus that funded the theorists. 

Pushu-ken wrote a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth. A woman named Ahatum recorded who owed her how much silver. Neither of them had a theory. They had prices and trust and the patience to walk a thousand kilometers for a net margin. 

That was enough. It always has been."

Related posts:

New PBS Series "First Civilizations" Has Interesting Episode On Trade (2018) 

Some History of Insurance (Insuring Against Disaster: Insurance policies go back to the ancient Babylonians and were crucial in the early development of capitalism) (2019) 

World's oldest writing not poetry but a shopping receipt (2020)

'World's oldest' coin factory discovered in China (2021) 

Both numeracy and literacy were invented in the service of finance and commerce (2024) 

Price controls in ancient Rome (2024)

How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics (2025) 

Related article:

The V.C.s of B.C. by Adam Davidson in The NY Times (2015) Excerpt: 

"during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 B.C. — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey"

Monetary Policy and the Great Crash of 1929: A Bursting Bubble or Collapsing Fundamentals?

By Timothy Cogley. He was then at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (1999). He is now at New York University. 

"In recent years, a number of economists have expressed concern that the stock market is overvalued. Some have compared the situation with the 1920s, warning that the market may be headed for a similar collapse. Indeed, some suggest that lax monetary policy contributed to the Great Crash and have argued that current monetary policy is also dangerously lax. For example, an April 1998 Economist article stated:

In the late 1920s, the Fed was also reluctant to raise interest rates in response to soaring share prices, leaving rampant bank lending to push prices higher still. When the Fed did belatedly act, the bubble burst with a vengeance.

To avoid the same mistake, The Economist suggested that it would be better for the Fed to take deliberate, preemptive steps to deflate the bubble in share prices. It warned that the bubble could harm the economy if it were to burst suddenly, reducing the value of collateral assets and bringing on a recession. The article went on to say that “the longer that asset prices continue to be pumped up by easy money, the more inflated the bubble will become and the more painful the economic after-effects when it bursts,” and it concluded that “the Fed needs to raise interest rates.”

In this Economic Letter, I argue that The Economist has misinterpreted the lessons of the Great Crash. A closer examination of the events of the late 1920s suggests it is mistaken on at least four points. First, stock prices were not obviously overvalued at the end of 1927. Second, starting in 1928 the Fed shifted toward increasingly tight monetary policy, motivated in large part by a concern about speculation in the stock market. Third, tight monetary policy probably did contribute to a fall in share prices in 1929. And fourth, the depth of the contraction in economic activity probably had less to do with the magnitude of the crash and more to do with the fact that the Fed continued a tight money policy after the crash. Hence, rather than illustrating the dangers of standing on the sidelines, the events of 1928-1930 actually provide a case study of the risks associated with a deliberate attempt to puncture a speculative bubble.

Monetary Policy 1927-1930 

In 1927, there was a mild recession in the United States. In addition, Britain was threatened by a balance of payments crisis whose proximate cause was a demand by France to convert a large quantity of sterling reserves into gold. Thus, both domestic and international conditions inclined the Fed to shift toward easing. The resulting fall in interest rates helped damp the decline in domestic economic activity and facilitated an outflow of gold toward Britain and France.

Should the Fed have refrained from easing in 1927 because of concerns that the stock market might be overvalued? Measures of conventional valuation suggest the answer is no, for there was no obvious sign of an emerging bubble at that time. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the price-dividend ratio on the value-weighted New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) portfolio. At the end of 1927, the price-dividend ratio was around 23, which is actually a bit below its long-run average of 25. Although share prices had risen rapidly in the 1920s, so had dividends. Given that the price-dividend ratio was slightly below average, the Fed would have had little reason to refrain from easing in a recession year or to decline assistance to a gold standard partner in maintaining balance of payments equilibrium.

 

In any case, equity prices began to accelerate in January 1928, and they rose by 39% for the year. Dividend payments also grew rapidly that year, and the price-dividend ratio increased by 27%.

Motivated by a concern about speculation in the stock market, the Fed responded aggressively. Between January and July 1928 the Fed raised the discount rate from 3.5% to 5%. Because nominal prices were falling, the latter translated into a real discount rate of 6%, which is quite high in a year following a recession. At the same time, the Fed engaged in extensive open market operations to drain reserves from the banking system. Hamilton (1987) reports that it sold more than three-quarters of its total stock of government securities: “in terms of the magnitudes consciously controlled by the Federal Reserve, it would have been difficult to design a more contractionary policy.”

Furthermore, as Eichengreen (1992) has emphasized, monetary policy was tight not only in the U.S. but also throughout much of the rest of the world. By that time, roughly three dozen countries had returned to the gold standard, and when the Fed tightened, many countries faced a dilemma: Unless their central banks also tightened, lending from the U.S. would be disrupted and their balance of payments would move toward a deficit. In that case, they would either have to devalue or abandon the gold standard altogether. The former option was unattractive for countries with dollar-denominated debts, and the latter was virtually out of the question at the time, especially for countries where restoration of the gold standard had been painful and difficult.

The alternative was to conform with the Fed. By shifting toward more contractionary monetary policies, other gold standard countries could ensure that domestic interest rates would rise in parallel with those in the U.S. and would be able to maintain balance of payments equilibrium. This explains, for example, why the Bank of England shifted toward tighter policy in 1928, three years after Britain had entered a slump. It also explains why countries still rebuilding from WWI would adopt contractionary policies.

The implication is that monetary policy was far more restrictive than a purely domestic perspective might suggest. In 1928 there was a synchronized, global contraction of monetary policy, which occurred primarily because the Fed was concerned about stock prices. These actions had predictable effects on economic activity. By the second quarter of 1929 it was apparent that economic activity was slowing. The U.S. economy peaked in August and fell into a recession in September.

What were the effects on the stock market? At the beginning of 1929, it seemed that the contractionary measures taken in 1928 were working. The NYSE price-dividend ratio reached a local peak in January and then fell gradually through the first half of the year. Thus, it appeared that stock prices had stabilized. Furthermore, shares still were not obviously overvalued. The local peak was reached at 30.5, which is roughly 20% above the long-term average. Dividends had grown rapidly through 1928, and investors projecting similar growth rates forward may have been willing to settle for dividend yields somewhat below the long-run average.

Monetary policy was on hold during the first half of 1929, and some economists have argued that inaction in this period was responsible for the events that followed. But three observations are relevant here. First, as mentioned above, price-dividend ratios had stabilized and were falling gradually. To a contemporary observer, it would have appeared that the actions of 1928 were having the intended effects. Second, it was becoming increasingly apparent that general economic activity was slowing, and many other countries already had entered recessions. And third, while monetary policy was not becoming tighter, it was still quite tight. Short-term real interest rates were still around 6%, and there was no growth in the monetary base.

Price-dividend ratios continued to fall until July 1929, but then prices began to take off. In August, the Fed raised the discount rate by another percentage point to 6%. The stock market peaked in the first week of September. It is worth noting that at its peak the price-dividend ratio was 32.8, which is well below values reached in the 1960s or 1990s. Share prices declined in a more or less orderly fashion until the end of October, but then the market crashed. From its peak, the price-dividend ratio fell roughly 30%, to a level roughly similar to that prevailing at the beginning of 1928, when the Fed began to tighten.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the New York Fed took prompt and decisive action to ease credit conditions. When investors attempted to liquidate their equity holdings, many lenders also called their loans to securities brokers. With the encouragement of officials at the New York Fed, many of these brokers’ loans were taken over by New York banks, who were allowed to borrow freely at the discount window for this purpose. The New York Fed also bought government securities on its own account in order to inject reserves into the banking system. In this way, they were able to contain an incipient liquidity crisis and prevent the crash from spreading to money markets.

But this respite from tight money proved to be temporary. After the liquidity crisis had been contained, monetary policy once again resumed a contractionary stance. Throughout 1930, officials at the New York Fed repeatedly proposed that the System buy government securities on the open market, but they were systematically rebuffed. The reasons other members of the Federal Reserve gave for opposing monetary expansion are instructive. Several felt that much of the investment undertaken in the previous expansion was fundamentally unsound and that the economy could not recover until it was scrapped. Others felt that a monetary expansion would only ignite another round of speculative activity, perhaps even in the stock market. In any event, monetary policy remained contractionary; the monetary aggregates fell by 2% to 4%, and long- term real interest rates increased.

By maintaining a contractionary stance throughout 1930, after a recession had already begun, the Fed contributed to a further decline in economic activity and share prices. By the end of the year, the price-dividend ratio had fallen to 16.6, or roughly 34% below the long-run average. By then, there was a consensus that speculative activity had been eliminated!

Were the Fed’s actions stabilizing or destabilizing?

If one grants that a speculative bubble existed at the beginning of 1928, when the Fed began to tighten, then stocks must have still been overvalued in the aftermath of the crash. After all, price-dividend ratios were about the same in the dark days of November 1929 as at the beginning of 1928, and fundamentals must surely have taken a turn for the worse. If equities were still overvalued, it follows that a further dose of contractionary monetary policy was needed to purge speculative elements from the market. Perhaps this is what motivated the famous advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to President Herbert Hoover, to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” To argue that the actions of 1928-1930 were stabilizing, one must adopt the liquidationist position.

On the other hand, if one interprets the Great Crash as a bursting bubble, so that shares were more or less properly valued in the aftermath, then it follows that they were probably also not far from their fundamental values at the start of 1928, when the Fed began to tighten. Again, prices and price-dividend ratios were about the same after the crash, and fundamentals had surely become less favorable. According to this interpretation, the Fed’s initial actions may have been destabilizing, and the actions of 1930 certainly were.

Conclusion

In retrospect, it seems that the lesson of the Great Crash is more about the difficulty of identifying speculative bubbles and the risks associated with aggressive actions conditioned on noisy observations. In the critical years 1928 to 1930, the Fed did not stand on the sidelines and allow asset prices to soar unabated. On the contrary, its policy represented a striking example of The Economist’s recommendation: a deliberate, preemptive strike against an (apparent) bubble. The Fed succeeded in putting a halt to the rapid increase in share prices, but in doing so it may have contributed one of the main impulses for the Great Depression."

Related posts:

What Causes Recessions? What Do Recessions Look Like?

Some Bad News for Good News — Optimistic Forecasts Create Recessions

What ends expansions? (or what causes recessions according to Alan Blinder and Austan Goolsbee)

Are business cycles imbedded in longer cycles called financial cycles?

The Seasonally Adjusted CPI Was up 0.47% in May

Here are the changes in the seasonally adjusted CPI for the six months ending in May: 

Nov. 0.2523% (change from Sept-There was no report for October due to the government shutdown)

Dec. 0.2978%

Jan. 0.1708%

Feb. 0.2670

March 0.865%

April 0.640%

 

The last decline was June 2024 when it was -0.042%.

See Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) compiled by the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis for data on the seasonally adjusted CPI.

That site shows a graph but if you click on the Download button you will get the actual numbers in Microsoft Excel.

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average (CPIAUCSL) was 333.979 in May and 332.407 in April. Since 333.979/332.407 = 1.0047, that means it was up 0.47%. If we had that every month for 12 months it would be up 5.82%. 

It was 320.620 in May 2025. Since 333.979/320.620 = 1.0417, that means it was up 4.17% over the last 12 months.

The non-seasonally adjusted CPI was 335.123 in May and 321.465 in May 2025. That was up 4.25%. So pretty close to the seasonally adjusted CPI. This is well above the Fed's target of 2.0% (although they prefer to use the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index which was 3.8% higher in April 2026 than April 2025).

For more information see Consumer prices rose 4.2% annually in May, highest in three years by Jeff Cox of CNBC. Excerpt:

"Inflation accelerated in May as rising energy costs contributed to pain for consumers, though underlying pressures were less intense.

The consumer price index, a broad gauge of goods and services costs across the U.S. economy, rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.5% for the month, putting the annual inflation rate at 4.2%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Both numbers were in line with the Dow Jones consensus though the monthly number was 0.1 percentage point below the April reading.

Inflation climbed above 4% for the first time in three years, though the increase met expectations amid concerns over how much the surge in energy prices would impact the economy. The level was the highest since April 2023 and above the 3.8% reading from April.

However, stripping out volatile food and energy prices, the so-called core CPI accelerated 0.2% for the month and 2.9% from a year ago. While the annual rate was in line with the forecast, the monthly gain was below the 0.3% estimate and less than the 0.4% April increase."

The article also discusses what types of products are going up in price and what is going down. There is a graph of the monthly year-over-year percent change in prices and core prices going back almost 4 years."   

Related material: 

Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items Less Food and Energy in U.S. City Average (CPILFESL) This is also from from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), compiled by the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It has the seasonally adjusted core CPI.

 

Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2025

 

Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index 

 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics makes seasonal adjustments. See Consumer Price Index Summary.

 

The table below has the annual inflation rate since 1914 in the columns labeled CPI %Ch. or CPI percentage change. It is from Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2026 and is not seasonally adjusted. It is also the December to December change in the CPI. That site also looks at how the 12 month average for the CPI changed from one year to the next.

 

Year	CPI %Ch.		Year	CPI %Ch.		Year	CPI %Ch.		Year	CPI %Ch.
1914	1		1944	2.3		1974	12.3		2004	3.3
1915	2		1945	2.2		1975	6.9		2005	3.4
1916	12.6		1946	18.1		1976	4.9		2006	2.5
1917	18.1		1947	8.8		1977	6.7		2007	4.1
1918	20.4		1948	3		1978	9		2008	0.1
1919	14.5		1949	-2.1		1979	13.3		2009	2.7
1920	2.6		1950	5.9		1980	12.5		2010	1.5
1921	-10.8		1951	6		1981	8.9		2011	3
1922	-2.3		1952	0.8		1982	3.8		2012	1.7
1923	2.4		1953	0.7		1983	3.8		2013	1.5
1924	0		1954	-0.7		1984	3.9		2014	0.8
1925	3.5		1955	0.4		1985	3.8		2015	0.7
1926	-1.1		1956	3		1986	1.1		2016	2.1
1927	-2.3		1957	2.9		1987	4.4		2017	2.1
1928	-1.2		1958	1.8		1988	4.4		2018	1.9
1929	0.6		1959	1.7		1989	4.6		2019	2.3
1930	-6.4		1960	1.4		1990	6.1		2020	1.4
1931	-9.3		1961	0.7		1991	3.1		2021	7
1932	-10.3		1962	1.3		1992	2.9		2022	6.5
1933	0.8		1963	1.6		1993	2.7		2023	3.4
1934	1.5		1964	1		1994	2.7		2024	2.9
1935	3		1965	1.9		1995	2.5		2025	2.7
1936	1.4		1966	3.5		1996	3.3
1937	2.9		1967	3		1997	1.7
1938	-2.8		1968	4.7		1998	1.6
1939	0		1969	6.2		1999	2.7
1940	0.7		1970	5.6		2000	3.4
1941	9.9		1971	3.3		2001	1.6
1942	9		1972	3.4		2002	2.4
1943	3		1973	8.7		2003	1.9

 

Here is a timeline graph of this data: