GoodFellows: Conversations on Economics, History & Geopolitics Locusts and Pirates: What’s Your Favorite Recession? with Tyler Goodspeed | Hoover Institution
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Mar 25, 2026 Tyler Goodspeed, economic historian and former White House CEA chair, explains why recessions are shock-driven rather than old‑age declines. He recounts dramatic cases from locust plagues to pirate attacks, connects finance and policy failures to big downturns, and compares past oil shocks and wartime disruptions to modern economic risks.
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Watch For Internal Bank Reserve Drains
- Monitor internal bank reserve drains after local shocks because small undercapitalized banks can trigger wider credit contraction.
- Goodspeed highlights deposit runs from rural banks bleeding into regional reserve city correspondents in early 20th-century U.S. crises.
Avoid Contractionary Policy During Downturns
- Avoid contractionary fiscal and monetary responses after shocks because state policy can greatly worsen recessions.
- Goodspeed warns 1929–33 and the Irish Famine show how bad policy deepened human and economic costs.
Modern Policy Didn't Eliminate Recessions
- Despite bigger modern states, recession depth and duration are remarkably constant over centuries; expansions live longer but still need big shocks to end.
- Goodspeed finds no structural break from Fed or FDR that shortened recessions historically.
