Charting The US (Un)Recovery (The real truth in graphs)

Zero Hedge ^ | 1/23/2012 | Tyler Durden

[GlockThe Vote]

How does the current recovery compare to those of the past? The following charts from the Council on Foreign Relations puts the current (un)recovery in context and despite some apparently bright news recently, the pictures underline the economy's weakness since the NBER's recovery began in June 2009.

[GlockThe Vote]

Amazing graphs at site. perhaps others can post?

BTW - someone send this to mittens so he can STFU!

[al_c]

[wolfpat]

I wonder how they measure economic growth. Don’t forget the inflation of the currency caused by “Quantitative Easement” from the current administration and the Federal Reserve. Have they factored that it?

[al_c]

[al_c]

Ugh ... why am I doing this one post at a time?! Here are the rest ....

[teeman8r]

the manipulation of the market and the uncertainty of the housing futures, though it is certain the value will be less than what is owed, nevertheless, will cause consumers to cut back on spending... why the smartest man in the white house has trouble seeing this baffles me.

teeman

[Track9]

That’s exactly right. Inflation is how they’re boosting GDP numbers. There isn’t any increase in ‘production’, it just costs more. (GDP is the measure of how much is produced and the value of it.) This ‘recovery’ talk is total bunk.

[kabar]

Real GDP is growing, but weakly compared with the postwar average recovery.

The recovery from the 1980 recession was even weaker at this stage, but that reflected a double-dip recession in 1981.

[DB]

Take out the $1.4 trillion annual deficit spending (10% of GDP) and see what this data looks like... It would be big time negative...

We’ve been spending our future GDP now and this is what we got for it...

[DB]

No it isn’t.

10% of that “GDP” is borrowed/printed money.

[kabar]

So if we borrow more money our GDP will increase?

[DB]

I believe they count federal spending minus tax revenue in the GDP numbers. AKA - “stimulus”.

Currently about 10% of the GDP is made up of borrowed/printed money and has been for three years running.

If you really think about that - it is devastating to the true nature of our current economic condition.

[kabar]

We have a national debt of $15 trillion, which is about equal to our GDP. Our publicly held debt is about $10.5 trillion. Here is a study that discusses debt and GDP.

The real effects of debt--At moderate levels, debt improves welfare and enhances growth. But high levels can be damaging. When does debt go from good to bad? We address this question using a new dataset that includes the level of government, non-financial corporate and household debt in 18 OECD countries from 1980 to 2010. Our results support the view that, beyond a certain level, debt is a drag on growth. For government debt, the threshold is around 85% of GDP.

The immediate implication is that countries with high debt must act quickly and decisively to address their fiscal problems. The longer-term lesson is that, to build the fiscal buffer required to address extraordinary events, governments should keep debt well below the estimated thresholds. Our examination of other types of debt yields similar conclusions. When corporate debt goes beyond 90% of GDP, it becomes a drag on growth. And for household debt, we report a threshold around 85% of GDP, although the impact is very imprecisely estimated