The Recovery: It Doesn't Look Good Yet
Feb. 25th, 2012 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorLast year, I posted a graph from Calculated Risk that compared the recovery time in employment to a variety of other recessions:
Make it bigger!
I recently tried to use different metrics to measure the progress of my prediction, but to no avail. Happily, so we can compare apples to other apples, CR has recently updated his graph:
Bigger!!!
As you can see, this economic downturn is behaving very differently from others in our recent past. I doubt we will recover to 0.0% by April, the calendar benchmark I noted in last year's post. And given that we're paying a buck a gallon more for fuel than we did last year and looking to pay even more when "driving" season starts, I think that ol' Gas Ceiling will once again crack on our collective noggins and push employment downward, perhaps even lower than the -6.3% base we experienced at the "bottom" of the current downturn.
I'm reading now what really inflated this bubble, and how hard it should get before the author considers the excesses to have unwound. (Expect a lot more discussion of that book here in the near future.) Given that this deflation needs to happen during the Bumpy Plateau ride we can expect after passing the Peak . . . I am increasingly not optimistic that we will ever return to our former standard of living.
Which may or may not be a bad thing.
Make it bigger!
I recently tried to use different metrics to measure the progress of my prediction, but to no avail. Happily, so we can compare apples to other apples, CR has recently updated his graph:
Bigger!!!
As you can see, this economic downturn is behaving very differently from others in our recent past. I doubt we will recover to 0.0% by April, the calendar benchmark I noted in last year's post. And given that we're paying a buck a gallon more for fuel than we did last year and looking to pay even more when "driving" season starts, I think that ol' Gas Ceiling will once again crack on our collective noggins and push employment downward, perhaps even lower than the -6.3% base we experienced at the "bottom" of the current downturn.
I'm reading now what really inflated this bubble, and how hard it should get before the author considers the excesses to have unwound. (Expect a lot more discussion of that book here in the near future.) Given that this deflation needs to happen during the Bumpy Plateau ride we can expect after passing the Peak . . . I am increasingly not optimistic that we will ever return to our former standard of living.
Which may or may not be a bad thing.