Flow-of-funds structure of the U.S. economy 2001–2018

Abstract

Great inventions and substantial productivity growth of the Roaring Twenties brought unprecedented prosperity to the United States. After Black Thursday in the fall of 1929 however, the U.S. economic landscape changed dramatically. To ensure that the bitter experience of the Great Depression does not recur, Wesley Mitchell and Morris Copeland, the architects of flow-of-funds analysis, urged a better understanding of the circulation of funds, the means of payment. The new century has so far brought us many technological innovations and new ways of doing business. The objective of the paper is to find out if and how well the funds have been flowing in the U.S. economy over the past two decades, using the flow-of-funds matrix (payer-payee matrix) proposed by Tsujimura and Tsujimura ([2018]. A flow of funds analysis of the U.S. quantitative easing. Economic Systems Research, 30(2), 137–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/09535314.2018.1443908). The industrial revolution of the new century does not seem to have enough momentum circulating funds, the lifeblood of the economy.