The recent jobs report demonstrating a .3% decrease in unemployment to 7.8% came as wonderful news both to the Obama campaign and our country as we slowly but surely climb out of the last recession. It's also been hilarious to see the tin foil hatters (like the chickenshit Welch) go nuts on this latest unemployment report as they ironically want nothing but bad news about our economy in order to get Obama out of the White House.
But I think what's important is a paper that came out in 2010 called "After the Fall" by economists Carmen and Vincent Reinhart, which examined the rates of recovery from financial crisis recessions. It helps put our current recovery in the proper context.
From the Bloomberg article back in April:
After a normal recession (which for the average post-World War II experience in the U.S. lasted less than a year), the economy quickly snaps back; within a year or two, it not only recovers lost ground but also returns to trend.
After systemic financial crises, however, economies of the postwar era have needed an average of four and half years just to reach the same per capita gross domestic product they had when the crisis started. We find that, on average, unemployment rates take a similar time frame to hit bottom and housing prices take even longer. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, economies on average needed more than a full decade to regain the initial per capita GDP.
The authors further go on to describe the financial crisis unemployment recovery rates from the 2010 paper:
“After the Fall,” a 2010 paper written by one of the authors of this article and Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed official who is now chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, added evidence that in 10 of 15 severe post-WWII financial crises, unemployment didn’t return to pre-crisis levels even after a decade. It also showed that in seven of the 15 crises there were “double dips” in output.
Unemployment is back under 8%, back to the levels before Obama took office. This was achieved despite all efforts by the GOP to block any jobs bill Obama proposed. This happened,
again, and
again, including a recent bill to
help veterans attain a job.
Say what you will about Obama and the Democrats about getting us out of this mess that Bush left us with. I've said plenty in the past. To get us where we are now in less than 4 years with all the GOP obstructionism is nothing shy of remarkable.