General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Seriously, did so many people truly believe that president Obama could change the course.... [View all]Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)Because the US did not keep a lot of economic stats at the time. There is good import/export data and some decent income data/production data, decent banking data, stock exchange data, freight data and not much else. There has been a lot of economic research done on that era, and different scholars have come up with different results.
There are still errors in economic data, but to answer your question about the bottom:
Peak US unemployment in the downturn was 10.1% in October of 2009. We are now at 8.6%.
Wage and salary disbursements troughed in Q3 2009, at 6.251 trillion (from a peak of 6.6 trillion in Q1 2008). They have since rebounded to 6.641 trillion in Q3 2011, past the previous peak.
Real GDP troughed at 12.641 trillion in Q2 2009, from a previous peak of 13.326 trillion in Q4 2007. We have since rebounded to 13,337 trillion in Q3 2011, just past the previous peak, although all of these figures could be revised for years to come. Note that that interval is by far and away the worst in post-war experience. The downturn really lasted about three years.
So we came off bottom and have struggled back to a level comparable to where we came in. Wherever the bottom truly was, it is long gone. But structurally this was more similar to a depression or an old-fashioned panic than any "recession" in US history.
There is one measure I use that does not agree with what I just wrote. It is real personal income excluding current transfer payments. You can get it in Table 2.1 at BEA.gov.
Real personal income excluding current government transfer payments has not rebounded, even in aggregate. It peaked at 9.843 trillion in Q1 2008 and fell to a shocking trough of 8.845 trillion in Q4 of 2009. It has since improved. Currently in Q3 2011 it is figured at 9.166 trillion. This is not a good indicator - the private economy is still keeping people poor.
Real per capita personal income (includes social benefits) peaked in the last cycle at $33,794 in Q2 of 2008. It troughed at an excruciating $31,782 in Q4 of 2009. It then rebounded to an interim high of $32,670 in Q1 of 2011, but then started to fall again due to the Fed's QE2 and the stupid DC move of giving high tax breaks to wealthy people while raising federal taxes on the poorest people (surely one of the stupidest moves ever committed in US economic history). So as of Q3 2011 it had fallen again to $32,335.
So by that measure, I would say that you are correct and we have entered a second downturn. What I believe will happen is that inflation will now fall out and personal disposable incomes will start rising again, which will prevent another recession from truly taking hold, but they cannot really get off the bottom until we stop our epically stupid and self-destructive policies of redistributing income from the poorer people to the wealthier people, which is the policy the US administration has now adopted on a bipartisan basis.
On a per capita basis, and on a private income basis, the economy still truly sucks. But the forces that led to this were mostly over a decade in the making and Obama couldn't have affected them.
Because of his hideous policy errors in the last year, Obama has lost my support. I might as well have voted for the ghost of Ronald Reagan. But in fairness, the first part of this tragic economic decline was not at all Obama's fault - it comes from the bubble policy of two prior administrations (Clinton and Bush). Nothing Obama could have done could have prevented the contraction in force when he took office from playing out.
In the last year, this administration has made the economy worse than it otherwise would have been, in cooperation with the Fed. That is true. But only in the last year.