Are we still in the short run?

The excellent Eli Dourado reports:

I think there is good reason to think that the short run is over—it is short, after all.

My first bit of evidence is corporate profits. They are at an all time high, around two-and-a-half times higher in nominal terms than they were during the late 1990s, our last real boom…

If you think that unemployment is high because demand is low and therefore business isn’t profitable, you are empirically mistaken. Business is very profitable, but it has learned to get by without as much labor.

A second data point is the duration of unemployment. Around 40 percent of the unemployed have been unemployed for six months or longer. And the mean duration of unemployment is even longer, around 40 weeks, which means that the distribution has a high-duration tail…

Now, do you mean to tell me that four years into the recession, for people who have been unemployed for six months, a year, or even longer, that their wage demands are sticky? This seems implausible.

A third argument I’ve heard a lot of is that mortgage obligations have remained high—sticky contracts—while income has gone down. Garett Jones endorses this as a theory of monetary non-neutrality, and I agree. In fact, I beat him to it. But just because debt can make money non-neutral in the short run does not mean that we are still in the short run.

In fact, there is good evidence that here too we are out of the short run. Household debt service payments as a percent of disposable personal income is lower than it has been at any point in the last 15 years.

There are numerous pictures at the link.

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