The recession is over, says Newsweek. We're at "the beginning of the end of the recession," says the president.
Maybe. It depends on the definition of "recession" and "is" and "over." Economists - the same folks who tell us pay is up and inflation is tame - can probably make a case.
But evidence putting the lie to this little reverie is set to arrive from the Labor Department at 8:30 a.m. today.
The monthly jobs report may show that unemployment topped 10 percent last month for the first time since 1983. It'll probably disclose that U.S. payrolls shrank by another 300,000 jobs or so, bringing cumulative losses over the last two years to nearly 7 million jobs.
The "recession is over" talk focuses on the gross domestic product - all the stuff we make and sell every week. That is supposed to be growing again this summer after cratering for many months. Maybe it's true. If so, that's better than more decline.
But it won't offer much help to the millions of unemployed Americans. They're not going to tell you the recession is over until they start getting hired, or at least start seeing their neighbors getting hired. And that might not happen for a while.
In recent decades there has been a weird disconnect between GDP growth and job growth after recessions. Traditionally, when GDP started growing again, employment quickly followed.
Not any more. Or at least not in the last two slumps. The slow rebound in the early 1990s was dubbed "the jobless recovery," helping bounce President George H.W. Bush from office after he tried to equate mere GDP growth with a real upswing.
The employment recovery from the 2001 recession was even worse. Economic output resumed expanding at the end of that year, but employment kept falling and falling and falling. Once the recession was officially declared over, it took the country more than three years - 39 months - to replace all the jobs that had been lost.
From World War II through the 1980s, by contrast, the average jobs-recovery period after each recession was only 9 1/2 months.
This comeback will be light on jobs in a manner similar to the previous two, many analysts believe. "The mother of all jobless recoveries" is the dire shorthand.
"In the past, businesses would hold on to their workers during recessions, figuring they would need them when business improved," economist and market strategist Ed Yardeni wrote in a note to clients this week. "This time, businesses seem to be betting that when their sales recover, they'll be able to increase output with greater productivity" - not more workers.
