By one estimate, such multinational corporations accounted for nearly 35 percent of total U.S. corporate assets by 1966.26 Organizational structure during the productivity boom of the late 1990s has, in some respects, shifted away from the large corporations that dominated the U.S. economy during much of the twentieth century. To be sure, the marketplace in many industries is still dominated by large, well-established firms.
Second, high-quality and timely data are crucial inputs to the process of making economic policy. Because we had access to high-frequency data, we were able to see that the sharp further downturn in the economy in early 1975 reflected largely an inventory correction and that final demand was holding up.