If this was a recovery…

It remains to be seen if the stock market collapse of the past three weeks or so will be followed by very bad GDP numbers and renewed job losses. How far did the recovery from the Great Recession get before the big relapse of stock-market volatility?

A new Levy Institute one-pager features some graphs that reveal a very weak recovery indeed, or even the start of a prolonged slump in economic growth and job creation, despite the fact that the recession ended in June 2009 by semi-official reckoning. Figure 3 in the new publication illustrates the country’s lack of progress in reversing recession-driven declines in the ratio of employment to the total civilian working-age population. Indeed, the figure shows that, according to the broadest figures available, the current employment problem is unprecedented in a period spanning back 40 years in terms of its overall size at the national level.

As the new one-pager states, Figure 3 shows

separate lines for the past six US recessions. Each line traces the path of the employment-to-population ratio relative to its level in the first month of each recession. The pink line corresponds to the most recent recession; it shows that, as of July, the ratio stood at 58.1 percent—4.6 percent less than at the recession’s start, 43 months earlier.