Finally -- figures show recession is REALLY over
Recessions, as the name indicates, are when economic output shrinks. So to technically indicate a recession, a country's GDP has to be going backward. Economists declare the recession over whenever the slide stops and the economy starts creeping up again -- no matter how deep the hole it fell into. If you topple down a well a mile deep, the experts basically say the crisis is over once you've climbed back a few inches.
Maybe this is a better definition of the end of a recession: when you get back to the top of the well. We reached that point according to last quarter's GDP figures, says Bloomberg:
The value of goods and services produced in the U.S. surpassed its pre-recession level after 15 quarters, taking three times longer than the average for 10 previous recoveries since World War II.“The American economy finally has accomplished the recovery and has now entered the expansion,” said Neal Soss, chief economist with Credit Suisse in New York, who was an aide to former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. “But the growth is clearly too slow to solve the most significant problems the economy faces: jobs and getting the public budgets under control.”
Today's economy is adding the marginal GDP that economists once expected to come years ago.
Comments
Hopefully we will continue to improve. If our government can take a cue from the Europeans this past week we can possibly reach the point where we are bringing down the unemployment rate.
Posted by: DIY Investor | October 29, 2011 8:44 AM
In that the American economy is rebounding is just an illusion, with figures manufactured that do not represent reality, but only what some economists wish to believe is happening to enable Obama to look good when he has not a clue how to fix things.
One quarter of anemic growth does not signal a recovery which is bogged down by too much spending in the belief that government spending can take the place of unleashing the American spirit to produce jobs and an economic recovery through the public sector and the free-market system.
The recent economic bailout of Europe that so lifted the American stock market is just wishful thinking. It will prove to be a sham and a shell game in the weeks to come.
How could anyone believe that this nation is on an upward path. It would take 100,000 jobs every month just to keep up with this nation's population growth.
This nation is doomed to failure. As Mark Steyn has so appropirately said, "After American, what?"
American has gone the way of Europe from which it is doomed to failure. Socialism has never worked whenever and wherever it has been tried in the world.
The American people have been ignorant of what has built this nation. No longer is self-sacrifice considered necessary when the governnment is there to take care on them in a nanny state.
Do you really believe, Jay Hancock, that America has turned the corner toward an economic recovery just on the basis of one month of anemic growth?
Posted by: Nancy J. Thorner | October 30, 2011 12:55 AM
Listen up, Nancy:
Obama and the strength of America are in fact "fixing things." By using those words, you have admitted things were broken. Who broke them, and how? Unregulated greed and cronyism. Unnecessary wars. Oil men in the White House.
Dimwits like you want to go back to the notion that tax cuts and de-regulation will magically "unleash the American spirit" to produce jobs or some such idiotic fantasy. Bush did exactly that, for year after year, and what happened? What we see today.
The figures aren't "manufactured;" they're from the same sources Repugnicans use all the time. And anyone who uses the word "Socialism" to describe America should be locked in a cave right next to those drooling cretins who call Social Security a "Ponzi scheme."
Posted by: Thomas Brown | November 2, 2011 8:47 AM