Happy 10 Years Since the Start of the Great Recession

     The Great Recession started 10 years ago! Where does the time go? It was really an amazing thing, in a horrible way. The next most recent recession that is comparable is the Great Depression, hence the naming. It was just as severe a blow to our economic system, and has many eerie parallels to the Great Depression, such as the rise of fascism afterwards. But because we have made undeniable and, dare I temp fate, irreversible progress, the impact on our economy in terms of the decline in GDP and employment were many times smaller. 

     Make no mistake, the asset market collapse and financial crisis that led to the Great Recession was severe enough to cause a Great Depression if not for the economic progress we've made. But we still have so far to go, as evidenced by the damage we were unable to prevent. I feel confident in predicting we will get better still; the next century's Great Recession will look like a small re-adjustment to us, while still being the largest economic crisis in the future's modern times.

Anyway, here's a graph of a few important macroeconomic indicators indexed to the fourth quarter of 2007, the prior economic peak:

Employment is total non-farm employment, Poverty is the # of people under the poverty line, Annual Average Wage and NGDP are in nominal dollars (not adjusted for inflation). Notice how employment took the biggest hit, longest time to recover, and slowest growth overall. That's not unprecedented, it usually takes longer to recover and is limited in the long term by population growth.