This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 14, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

No one likes recession, but should the recession most Americans now expect

be blamed on so-called bad trade deals of years past.

Dan Griswold, the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies weighs in.

When a Federal Reserve Chairman uses the word recession when he's talking to members of Congress there is legitimate

concern that a recession may be in the air but that also brings up a lot of people

who say that we've signed a bunch of bad trade agreements,

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, two of the chief proponents

of that line of thinking, what's the role of trade

and business cycles?

Yeah, there's plenty of reasons not to want a recession and one of them is it tends to give ammunition to the demagogues who point to immigrants and foreign trade as somehow causing the recession and our problems.

And what our research shows at Cato is that far from causing recessions,

current trends in more trade and globalization in the United States

have probably contributed to a moderation of the business cycle. You know, all the evidence is that

recessions mercifully are less frequent, are shorter and

shallower than they've been in the past, and we cite our own research as well as Federal Reserve

research that shows basically if you look back in the decades before, about the mid-1980s is when the business cycle really started to moderate.

If you go before then, recessions were about two or three times more likely to happen in a, say a given decade.

They were deeper, they were longer, they led to higher unemployment rates.

You know, you look at the last 25 years and

excluding the current recession that we may be in. The last 25 years we've only had

...