The National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the recession ended in June 2009, over a year ago. This recession was the longest since World War II, coming in at 18 months. Of course, many of us who are still suffering from the aftereffects of the recession are still skeptical; no magical solution has arrived yet, and no magical solution will arrive anytime soon. Unemployment rates are still high and will remain high for quite some time. While I hate to throw around these statistics due to not being to read through the methodology, 1 in 7 Americans live in poverty, with all of the top five poorest states being in the South and Southwest. Employers who are hiring still prefer local candidates even more than usual, and when people can’t afford to move to a new place to get that dream job, people are stuck in their old places and are stuck in a place where chasing their dreams becomes more difficult. The current state of the economy has made everyone more miserable.
You can bet the politicians will have a field day with this, though. After all, recession has technically been over for a year, right? Shouldn’t that mean the magic anti-recession button should have been pushed by now? If only that were the case.
2 replies on “Apparently the recession is over”
I’m not sure about that, personally. I graduated in May of 2009, and if I remember correctly (pretty sure I do, I haven’t lost my mind yet) June was terrible as far employment search and even stock performance goes. It took me nearly four months and dozens and dozens of applications to finally get picked up.
I’m not going to say I know better than any political or government agency, but having been thrust into the job market after college graduation in ’09, I have a hard time thinking it was over then. If I had to guess (for whatever its worth), I’d say the recession ended about 3-5 months ago. I noticed real estate stocks start to creep back up, more people were eating out on the weekends (just look around, you’ll see more people spending money than a year ago), and I even noticed that my mindset towards the economy changed, but only recently.
/soap box rant
@JMattHicks I thought the same thing while reading it. Then I remembered the original reports that said, “Well, looks like we’ve been in a recession since December 2007.” If you think about the actual definition of a recession, it’s a contraction of the economy, and that’s something you don’t really notice the effects of for months. I know I didn’t really notice much out of the ordinary was going on until late 2008. Things are definitely looking better now and even a few months ago, but that won’t get reported until monthly and quarterly reports later. But hey, I’m not an economist, though I may make a decent one thanks to my math background. And to that I say, ergh, applied math. 🙂
Besides all this, the term recession is a debated term in the economics community. Depression is obvious (well, to the economists). Recession has at least two different definitions, and I’m not sure which one these folks are using. It’d be interesting to know, though.
I also graduated in May 2009 and went through the same soul-sucking process that was the job search. We graduated at the worst possible time, didn’t we?