EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists
- Cornel West: Obama 'Is a War Criminal'
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Revealed: How US State Department 'Twists Arms' on Monsanto's Behalf
Popular content
Today's Top News
U.S. Exits Longest Recession Since World War II
WASHINGTON - The U.S. economy exited recession in June 2009, the National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday, making it official that the downturn was the longest in more than half a century.
Protesters hold signs aloft during a rally for unemployed people in front of the New York Stock Exchange in New York September 1, 2010. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson) More than eight million jobs were lost in the slump that was triggered by dodgy Wall Street mortgage investments.
President Barack Obama said the end of the "Great Recession" would come as little solace to the millions of people who are still out of work
"Even though economists may say that the recession officially ended last year, obviously for the millions of people who are still out of work, people who have seen their home values decline, people who are struggling to pay the bills day to day, it's still very real for them."
The NBER underscored that slow pace of recovery as it issued a statement that confirmed: "The recession lasted 18 months, which makes it the longest of any recession since World War II.
"The committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity," it noted, pointedly.
At the same time it warned "economic activity is typically below normal in the early stages of an expansion, and it sometimes remains so well into the expansion."
Earlier on Monday the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development warned that the U.S. economy would grow at a slower-than-expected rate of 1.5 per cent this year.
The Paris-based OECD said U.S. growth would be far less than the 3.2 per cent predicted in May, and would increase to only 2.3 per cent next year raising the specter of a painfully slow recovery.
"The United States is slowly recovering from a severe recession and, with economic growth projected to remain low for some time," the OECD said.
The body added that "unemployment is likely to stay elevated for a relatively long period."
"Continuation of targeted support for the labor market may also be necessary until private sector employment picks up more strongly."
But there was some good news.
Despite economists' warnings of a double-dip recession, the NBER said the economy had already recovered enough that any new slide would be an entirely new recession.
"The committee decided that any future downturn of the economy would be a new recession and not a continuation of the recession that began in December 2007."
"The basis for this decision was the length and strength of the recovery to date."
Unlike many countries where a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of shrinking growth domestic product, in the United States it is determined by a seven-member NBER panel.
Although the depth of the crisis had already been clear, the NBER confirmed it was longer than those which began in 1973 and 1981 and which both lasted 16 months.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
72 Comments so far
Show All'but there was some good news'
Despite economists' warnings of a double-dip recession, the NBER said the economy had already recovered enough that any new slide would be an entirely new recession
ie: a new one is on the way...............
Yes, why exactly was this supposed to be good news? Good news for who?
Follow the money.
And, I heard that national debt increases the profits of the privately owned Federal Reserve, because of interest we pay on the massive debt. Is that true?
No... That is not true. You are wayyyy out to lunch. The banks can make a small amount of money by leaving their reserves with the Fed. Bernanke is talking about ending that to force the banks to loan the money out into the economy. The fed has about a trillion dollars to do what it wants with right now. At the time of the Tarp bailout the Fed printed up this money and loaned it out to Morgan Stanley, GS, etc. at near zero percent interest so they could "increase their reserves" and stabilize their stock prices. The banks deposited that money with the fed at a half percent higher! Sweet to be a Wall street banker! What can the Fed do with that deposited money? Sky is the limit these days. If they want to they can buy Treasury bonds with it (loan it to the government) but they want to minimize this because it causes a loss of faith in the dollar and increasing inflation..they call that Quantatative easing. In the past 10 years China has been buying treasury bonds. They wound up with over a trillion worth but quit buying a year ago. They have actually sold 100 billion worth of bonds since. The collapse of the economy caused a rush of people to dive into bonds thinking it the safest asset. China not buying bonds has not been an issue.... Yet. Some argue there is a "bubble" in US treasury bonds. I agree. Treasury bonds are not safe because the US has no means of paying it back. Our corporate leaders and wall street sold our economy to the Chinese. The fact that they no longer wish to recycle their profits to US politicians is a bad omen for the near future. All we had is military power and the snakeoil salesmen on wall street before the crash. Now that the snakeoil salesman have been found out.... We got nothing but guns and bombs left. Congrats though! You live in interesting times. You get to find out what the citizens of the USSR found out. It sucks to have an empire and lose it!
Yes we moved out of a recession into the Greater Depression. How can anyone take these people seriously.
Now that the recession is over Obama can dissolve his deficit reduction commission and spare Social Security the gutting they have planned for it.
Ship of Fools!
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
This article is such steaming bullshit I believe it is for domestic French consumption under that bigotted prick Sarkozy. AGP is usually pretty leftist in its foreign policy critiques but this piece is as unquestioning of our McGoverment's spurious economic agency pronouncements as I've ever seen.
First of all, thanks to 30 years of de-regulation of corporate America coupled to 16 years of "free trade," and specific de-regulation of banks & derivatives coupled to 10 years of deliberately artificially low interest rates (to fuel the housing bubble to act as pre-planned neo-liberal Wall Street/Fed mask for the decimation of the underlying real economy due to offshoring of too much of our manufacturing base) we live in split-level Recession/Depression depending on your annual income level.
If you're making 50K a year you're experiencing roughly 7.6% unemployment so you perceive only a mild recession. If you're making $25K a year or less you're experiencing roughly 21% unemployment up to 30% unemployment for those making $12,550 a year or less--unemployment levels EXCEEDING the Great Depression (that maintained long periods of 25% unemployment & peaked at 27%).
Why? The ones making 50K a year or more include most of the professional classes and better educated citizens--though even our engineers and business majors are gradually seeing more and more of their jobs offshored or they are moving to take better opportunities in India and China. But the key to understanding the new split-level Amurkan Economy is this: These more affluent income groups derive an upwards sliding percentage of their income from dividends paid from stocks and mutual funds--the "financialized economy" that relied on TARP bailouts to subsidize our crooked big banks so they could use that money to keep speculating on the stock market to keep it running. THAT's what matters to the politicians, bankers and the rest of corporate America now (and the medium to small investors who are dependent on dividends)--not the the rest of us living in the overly offshored real economy who don't make enough (or nothing at all) to afford to buy stock or invest in mutual funds.
I don't mind a level playing field for American workers and workers anywhere in the world. I just wish the rest of the world was brought up to our standard rather than all of us being leveled downward.
Do you think the more affluent income groups are the next ones to take a hit "if" there is a "new recession?"
As far as the article being BS, I didn't read it that way. It was pointing out the BS of the end of recession report.
If by some magic the rest of the world were to rise to the US standard of living, the energy resources required would last no more than a couple of decades. And this is not taking into account the fact of global warming and population growth (which would actually declining if afore mentioned magic were actually occur.
China was a country of a few hundred thousand decently paid government workers and a billion starving people. Today they are a country of a few hundred thousand decently paid government workers and a middle class of 300 million... And 700 million starving people. That is the difference between making the things the world buys and starving. Americans better get government jobs. Lol. Look at the childish postings on this board! Lmao... They think the government is so powerful it can solve all our problems... That is the thinking that got us here. Get used to be being hungry or become a parasite. That is what is left for us.
Why is economics considered a science? I prefer to consider it as nothing more than the sociology of money. There are several different schools of economics. There is only one school of science. Harry Truman once said that he wanted to hire one-armed economists so he wouldn't have to hear "on the one hand yada yada yada and then on the other hand yada yada yada.
'Religion' has also recently been upgraded to being a science, don't you know.
This is all a part of a scientific program to improve the schools.
More like socio-pathology.
"The committee decided that any future downturn of the economy would be a new recession and not a continuation of the recession that began in December 2007."
Well, well, now. Let's see how those "new recession and not a continuation"-recessions pile up. It's all in the description: like 5 two-year recessions with a month or so in between, or a ten year long depression. However described, it's about a society strangling itself with lies and limitations benefitting the richest.
Perpetual war. Perpetual recession. Could there be a connection?
Bullshit.
About 44 Million In U.S. Lived Below Poverty Line In 2009, Census Data Show
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 16, 2010; 11:22 PM
In the second year of a brutal recession, the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in half a century and millions more are barely avoiding falling below the poverty line, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091602698.html
I heard about this as I was leaving my apartment to report to unemployment the details of my job hunting. I was so angry it was all I thought about on the way there...
...How this magic piece of propaganda is posited to seal the deal on making us millions of unemployed disappear; on making us the permanent underclass; on making us completely acceptable to ignore.
I can hardly stand to hear the sound of my own despair...especially because I know I'm right.
Yes, you are right. What a vicious culture of death we labor under! This proclamation of the "end" of the recession (depression in black and Latino communities) is as real as the end of combat missions in Iraq.
Yes, this political puffery turns our stomaches. Economists have been wrong and now they are cowards for issuing a report that everyone knows is tripe. They are pouring salt into our wounds for political gain. To hell with them!
Rebranding, if you can't fix it, rename it
Huh? End? Yes, Goebbels, we are at the end of the recession. Sieg, heil!
You're doing society a disservice posting crap like this. These people are where they are today because their families have amassed large amounts of wealth over hundreds of years, not because they worship a fictitious entity. The wealthy obviously will band together to protect their privilege, it's called class warfare, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why these people do what they do.
Just an fyi, paganism is not a branch of satanism, "paganism" was around way before any monotheistic religion, and doesn't refer to a single religion but rather a vast array of non-major polytheistic religions, it's much easier to direct the anger of idiots if you have a single "enemy".
Stop perpetuating the "stupification" of society.
How else to explain this fine mess we are in! Heard this somewhere else but I believe in it..."(wo)man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Free women don't want anyone murdered.
Put Lucifer on the $1,000 bill and, yeah, they'll worship Lucifer.
Cloud cuckoo-land. The Dow shot up rapidly after this 'news' which was probably the reason for its invention. Some of the usual suspects thought they could wring a few more drops of blood from the stone.
"---in the United States (a recession) is determined by a seven-member NBER panel."
Was this a 4-3 decision or were all of them delusional?
Fortunately, for all of us (whom our leaders are Constitutionally required to protect) Al-Qaeda hasn't as of yet been able to come up with the Bohemian Grove co-ordinates.
"Pledge to See a Movie During This National Emergency,"
by Jim Horn
(posted today, here at CD)
If you are a teacher with 28 children in your class this Fall, four of them live in poverty.
On Thursday the Census Bureau released a report showing that 1 of 7 Americans now lives in poverty. That's 44,000,000 people who, if they live in a family of four, have a family income that is less than $22,000 per year. If it were not for unemployment benefits, another 3,300,000 would be included in the poverty figures. Even with such impressive numbers that exceed the levels of poverty for when President Johnson declared the War on Poverty in the 1960s, higher numbers of people are without health insurance, which now stands at over 50,000,000 for the first time since records have been kept.
You mean most Americans only have been imagining that they have been suffering needlessly since June 2009? Gosh, what a shame!
The way I remember it is layoffs started in 2001 and haven't ended yet. I have many friends who never found jobs again after getting laid off and who have been kicked off unemployment for years. I guess spouses come in handy after all but I know a few whose marriages are over when they can move out because their wives are tired of supporting them.
I'm lucky, I stayed employed - so far and I'm female which has a lower layoff rate. Still, to call this event something that ended in 2009 and started 18 months before is an insult to everyone's intelligence.
H1B's took my coworkers jobs, as they did at all the places I've worked since 2003. It's an all out lie to say they aren't an absolute factor in the layoffs.
We are the new expendables, mere undeserving peasant stock like the beasts in the fields, our elimination is no cause for weeping. Our next demotion will involve poison gas or bullets. Economists will report that it helps profitability. Obama will agree. Blackwater will do the deed. People will voluntarily march to the slaughter house. Death becomes us, we earned it and the elites will carry it out, on our behalf, of course.
NBER = Numbingly Bogus Economic Recovery
Thanks to the gift of NBER, now all the politicians -- the GOPorkers, the DemocRats, Barack the Betrayer himself -- can twist reality into claims they ended the recession.
But before we get carried away with jeers and laughter, reflect on this:
The unemployment rate is a simple ratio: the jobless compared to the employed.
It can only be reduced in one of two ways: adding more jobs, or eliminating unemployed workers.
And here in the toxic darkness beneath the ObamaBush -- with the U.S. economy already outsourced to death -- how might we suppose that will be accomplished?
More jobs? Impossible; anyone with a lick of sense knows "Jobless Recovery" is forever.
Reduction of the workforce?
The only question is how:
Expanded euphemistic genocide by abandonment and neglect? (Already planned against elderly and disabled people via the $500 billion Medicare cut.)
Wholesale imprisonment of anyone who is jobless? (Why else the privatization and expansion of prison facilities?)
Outright genocide? (What other reason for kill-hardening the military in "useless" wars?)
Welcome to the United Estates, capitalism's Big Plantation, the de facto Fourth Reich...
I dig this post. It has a swagger to it. And it's all true, more or less.
A Conservative senior group is putting out the 500 billion cuts in Medicare add.
Check the truth meter here.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep/20/60-plus-
association/medicare-cuts-health-care-law-will-hurt-seniors-sa/
Thanks for the link. We un-'conservative' seniors pretty much know this from experience, but it's unlikely many other people do.
That ONE-TIME ONLY $250 'senior suckup' really helped a lot. My insulin alone costs over $100 a vial, and I need 5-vials a month. Thanks. They’re counting on us obsolete folks to do the right thing and die (for the greater good), so it doesn’t matter if we don’t vote or not. Win-Win (for them).
By the time the ‘donut hole’ is gone, the drug companies will have more than doubled their prices. You can absolutely count on it. I’ll be dead, but what are you ‘getting older’ folks going to do? When the Pharmaceutical companies wrote the law, they somehow neglected to put any controls on themselves (they were probably facing a midnight time-deadline).
The only good thing I see is that with the ‘recession’ officially over, we can pretty much count on a $20 increase in our Social Security ‘benefit’ sometime before the next election.
My short response is that (at the very best) you're misinformed. My detailed response to you is posted above.
Don't worry, lorenbliss, the Third Reich only lasted - what was it - a thousand years.
Before you jeer too loudly, I suggest you read a history of the Weimar Republic.
As to the duration of the Third Reich, what really ended its reign of terror was a combination of two factors: techno-industrial inferiority and the Red Army.
Today the technological superiority of the Ruling Class -- the fact its weapons give it truly divine immunity to overthrow and subversion -- guarantees its tyranny will prevail until our species becomes extinct.
And in any case there is no longer a Red Army -- nor will there ever be again.
The fictional Borg become real: resistance (save as suicide) is futile.
For thousands of years, work meant the difference between eating and not eating. Now robots make things. The roboticists and businesspeople are bound to hunt down the last job on earth and replace it with either a human political slave or a robot.
The American jobs are gone, and they will stay gone until either American voters all agree to be slaves, until the American government invents jobs such as digging holes all day, or until enough Congresspeople get tossed out of work that the remaining ones decide to lighten up on their evil foes, the American voters.
It's all a lie ! Americans are just settling in to living with less, and adjusting to loosing everything, just like the people after Katrina. I remember a year or so after Katrina and the "Media" said oh they are getting better, rebuilding... No , it took three years before there was any real change or improvement. This will take years to get out of ,because the Gov refuses to upset the Big Corps. profits.
Like the one poster said "they will squeeze every last drop of blood out of us".
One thing that inspires me, is that all the books I've read, and the history I remember, tells me,that we may fall very hard, before this is over, but the bad guys ...the main players, that brought us all here, to the Edge of Hell ...will pay, and they will pay with their lives, many will go to prison, these kinds of High Crimes activity, will only last but so long.
Don't know what history you've been reading, but it clearly is not of this planet.
Here on Earth -- at least since the sack of Knossos -- Evil ALWAYS wins in the end.
Just ask Boadicea...or Sitting Bull...or Rosa Luxemburg...or Leon Trotsky...or Malcolm X...or Martin Luther King Jr...or Allison Krause...or Karen Silkwood...or Paul Wellstone...
It certainly sounds like good news, but what I'd like to know is who the economists were that have decided the "recession" has recovered? Additionally, what school or schools of economics do they represent? I certainly do not share their assessment of where we are today - - it's not that much different from what it was six months ago, or one year, or eighteen months ago, or even two years ago. Come on, get out of your ivory towers and into the real world!
A world (or nation) where the job situation will never quite be where it once was (unless we get serious about going "green", and not until we do something more about our infrastructure, and not until we let the tax cuts for the rich expire, and most of all, not until we neutralize the control that the MIC, big oil, big Pharma, Wall Street and the Banks wield).
The following quickly and succinctly summarizes what the egg sucking rat bastards of the Republican and Democratic parties and their paymasters have in store for this nation:
THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM
The fact remains, however, that the kleptocratic rulers in the US, EU, and other debt-burdened countries know exactly what they are doing: to let the recession drag on, to take advantage of the crushing recession in order to extract “enough” concessions from the working people until welfare states are dismantled and labor costs in the more developed capitalist countries are made competitive with those of the less-developed countries. This explains why despite new signs of further global economic contraction, the reigning governments in these countries (whether they are nominally headed by Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, Democratic, Conservative or other parties) are maintaining their coordinated abstention from expansive or stimulating fiscal policies while continuing their brutal spending cuts on health, education, wages, pensions, and the like.
This is not to say that these governments do not want to have economic growth or job-creation—they do—but that they want them on their own (Neoliberal) terms, that is, through Neoliberal policies that would create jobs that would pay wages on a par with those of workers in less-developed countries. In other words, they prefer the kind of lopsided economic growth whose fruits would be reaped mostly by the wealthy—the so-called trickle-down or supply-side economic growth. As writer/reporter Patrick O’Connor points out, “In the US, Europe and other advanced capitalist economies, the aim is permanently reducing the living standards of working people.
"Unlike many countries where a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of shrinking growth domestic product, in the United States it is determined by a seven-member NBER panel."
Unlike Eurasia and Eastasia where natural phenomena are determined by the collection of empirical data, in Oceania they are determined by the decrees of Big Brother.
In other words, bend over and grab your ankles but congratulate yourself for being limber.
"A select seven-member group of crack economic chefs ... "
A select seven member group of economic chefs on crack ... "
I can usually tell a newly created homeless person from the people I see everyday. I won't forget the the man with his neatly packed suitcase in a shoppping cart and his extra pair of shoes to the side. All clean, obviously stressed, and with confusion that is unmistable. I know where you can get a meal everyday but Saturday and if you don't mind the church service there is a meal provided in one of the parks. Some have drug or alcohol problems and most of them have health problems. They sleep on cardboard and some recycle trash. I use to tell them that there are enough resources for everyone, that they shouldn't accept that there simply isn't enough to go around. I think the recession is far from over.
Anyone interested in what's really going on with the economy should read economist Michael Hudson's article at Counterpunch:
"Where is the World Economy Headed?" at
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson09202010.html
Longish, but very clarifying.