Barack Obama is back, and he wants credit for the booming economy. “When you hear how great the economy is doing right now,” he said in a speech last week, “let’s just remember when this recovery started.” That would be in the summer of 2009, but the story is more complicated. Milton Friedman was the first economist to notice a pattern in American economic history: The deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. The economy has to grow even faster than normal for a while to catch up to where it would have been without...

Source: Wall Street Journal September 10, 2018 22:41 UTC