We Have One-Third of a Great Depression

By the employment-to-population ratio metric, the recession is now twice as deep as any post-1960 recession. At 59.2%, the employment-to-population ratio stands 4.1 percentage points below its December 2006 cyclical high--and 5.5 percentage points below its April 2000 all time high.

We are at 1/3 of a Great Depression right now, and are going to go higher.

And there is this:

Comments

[Dave Wrixon:]

Well, the Great Depression took longer than this to unravel and at this point most commentators thought it was over even it though it was to get progressively much worse.

In many ways from a US perspective this is much worse, as this is an End of Empire contraction whilst the Great Depression was probably more to do with the end of somebody else's empire.

As for the numbers, yes it obvious that the length of unemployment is getting much worse, which greatly compounds the fact that there is still an increase in the number of net job loses, but even these figures simply do not square with the loss of tax revenues. Somebody is cooking the books.

Sep 06 04:50 AM

[socrateazz:]

Why do you think the unemployment rate is going beyond the trend?...The government is hiring more. No reason unless you concider decisions made by those who affect the trends. The President believes things that are wrong in reality. Too much wealth has been sucked out of producers and deposited within the hands of wealth manipulators. The problem has been growing through the 1980's until present. Reagan forced a change in corporate direction and it was good. The problem was trend should have been slowed and stoped in the 1990's. Instead acceleration was engaged and encouraged. Now you have greedy wealth stockpilers accumulating and trading wealth. You have a government which has over expanded and has been infiltrated by those wealth stockpilers. Where will we go from here? The leadership will point the way. I fear the similarities of the current leadership to both 1930's hitler and Hugo Chavez of recent times. Any leader who seems to consolidate their power at with a reason that others are wrong can be a problem. Does this leader even concider the other side? Or does this leader spend his time trying to convince everybody he is right and everybody else is wrong? Going to be interesting going forward! I hope my belief is totally without merit. Time tells all.

Sep 06 04:56 AM

[Ricard:]

This number (or methodology) looks much more preferable than the unemployment rate in determining the health of the economy. Thanks Prof de Long for posting this.

Sep 06 01:07 PM