We were NEVER in a recovery

This morning, I received an email from the brilliant and humble economist, Richard Wolff, author of Capitalism hits the Fan. Using one simple chart from the EPI (the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute in DC), he elegantly and concisely describes why that which the media tends to refer to as a recovery, has never felt like a recovery to most of the people in this country. 

I constantly rant and write about the fact that the main economic condition of individuals has never recovered (or in other words, banks who got trillions of dollars of back-up don't like to share), so the notion of talking about a 'double dip' recession is illogical. His piece shows that only certain corporate profits (and hence, their stock prices) regained some ground. This has translated into a few positive GDP figures (though in true political shell-game fashion, these keep being revised downward) which in turn have been used by Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, and others vested in their own egos, to justify the bailouts, subsidies, Treasury Department and Fed actions in 2008 that apparently saved us from some even more horrific fate. Yet, every measure of daily economic life: housing, jobs, health care per cost, personal bankruptcies, etc - has only shown deterioration since. 

Here's his piece. What do you think?

No Jobs = No Recovery

The Department of Labor released its weekly initial jobless claims today. They weren't good - at 484,000 people, the highest level in 6 months they were up by 2000 people since last week, and 14,250 since the prior week. The department also revised its previous claims estimates upwards. The trend and the reality continue to be unfortunately, dismal. We are still losing jobs.

And yet, news outlets continue to report this negative information as merely some kind of unanticipated interruption in the economic recovery we're all supposed to be enjoying (according to Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and the rest of Washington, anyway). This morning's interpretations of the claims?  They were higher than analysts' expectations.'  I continue to be amazed, not that economists keep getting it wrong, but that the media hasn't figured out that they are consistently overestimating the 'recovery' and underestimating the true deterioration in the economic condition of the country.