I think this may be the new normal. What has driven economic prosperity over the last 15 years? Bubbles. Dot com, Worldcom, Enron, Housing. Where is legit steady growth going to come from? Legit steady growth is going to be slow, probably slower than a lot of people would like... If we get growth at all though.
Why has no other recession led to such a sustained drop in employment? I'm not talking about GDP; I'm talking about actual employment. Plus, the dot.bust started in 2000, and even after 9/11/11, umployment went back to its peak level within 2 years.
Something interesting about that graph - the last 4 recessions, going back 30 years, have each lasted longer than all the previous recessions. If that is an indicator of something that has fundamentally changed about the economy, rather than a statistical aberration, then it should be no surprise that the recovery from this very deep recession is also very slow. barfo
Because this is more like a mini-depression than a recession & it probably would have been a depression that rivaled The Great Depression if all the world governments didn't pump money into their bank systems. That's important, this isn't a recession that only affected the US, every major economic power was hit by this. I was talking about "job growth" or "economic growth", obviously the job market & economy has "contracted" from when we had prosperous times. Your chart shows that it took about 3.5 - 3.8 years to get back to where it started. The only reason it got there was because of a new and exciting growth sector that emerged at the time. One that had unlimited growth potential, it was called the "housing market circa mid-2000s". Which is why we're living the high life now.
