Almost there

My apologies for slacking off and not keeping an up to date tracking here, but the economy kept me busy! Finally catching my breath now, I just did a Google News search for "Great Depression" and only got 66 hits and most of them were merely historical references, like references to the memories of old-timers who grew up during the Great Depression. By my count, only 11 of those articles were comparing the recent financial crisis and recession to the Great depression. So, we're almost there in terms of the media abandoning their obsession with these comparisons.

 

I think the incrementally improving employment reports have been a major factor. We now have more people working than before the financial crisis and "Great Recession", so that's one leg of the stool that is firmly in place, but unemployment is still elevated. Until we put that vast majority of the people who lost jobs as a result of the financial crisis and recession back to work, we will still technically be in what I continue to call a "mini recession", and we will still expect to see comparisons to "The Great Depression."

 

Those 11 articles I mentioned were just within the past 24 hours. We need to see that rate fall to no more than a handful for a full month, which would be a two order of magnitude reduction. I think that will happen, but it could be another two or three years before we stop hearing about people who are only working part time or in jobs well beneath their qualifications before we get to the stage where references to "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" ceases being an almost automatic cliché response.

 

I will continue to post to this blog on occasion, but I am going to drop my ownership of the "economicdepressionwatch.com" domain name since it really does seem like overkill at this stage. Hey, that's some measure of the progress that we have made!

 

-- Jack Krupansky