People have been asking me for a while to respond to John Taylor’s claim that financial-crisis-induced recessions aren’t characterized by slow recovery. It’s a very convenient claim for Romney/Ryan, of course, because if true it eliminates the best excuse for lackluster performance under Obama.

Well, Reinhart and Rogoff, who literally wrote the book on crises and their aftermath, have weighed in, and they’re not happy. They have two main complaints, both of which are completely valid.

The first is that looking at the rate of recovery from the trough is a very peculiar criterion — especially when, as Taylor does, you look only at the first year (!) of recovery. By this standard, the New Deal was a tremendous success story, because growth was fast in 1933-4. Never mind the fact that pre-crisis per capita GDP wasn’t restored for more than a decade. As R-R say, surely the relevant comparison is with the pre-crisis peak, especially given the fact that post-crisis economies often suffer periods of relapse (as is happening in Europe now).

The second is that Taylor is awfully free in designating recessions as the result of financial crisis. He counts 1973 and 1981 as financial crises, to which the only answer if you know your history is, what on earth is he talking about? These were both disinflation recessions, caused more or less deliberately by the Fed; the Fed pushed interest rates very high to calm prices, and a V-shaped recovery took place once the Fed decided we had suffered enough. This isn’t hindsight: the contrast between those kinds of recessions and the slump following the bursting of a housing bubble was the reason many of us predicted a long, slow recovery well in advance. (It’s been even slower than I predicted back then, but in early 2008 I didn’t realize how bad the debt overhang was).

Call this another example of how politicization is hurting economics. The proposition that financial crises change macroeconomic outcomes is surely one of the big things we’ve learned in recent years. Yet here we have well-known economists refusing to listen and throwing out misleading studies, which just happen to be convenient politically.