Morning Must-Read: Andrew Fieldhouse: 5 Years After the Great Recession, Our Economy Still Far from Recovered

Andrew Fieldhouse: 5 Years After the Great Recession, Our Economy Still Far from Recovered: “This June marks the five-year anniversary of the end of the Great Recession…

…but champagne toasts would be distastefully premature, as the U.S. economy remains far from fully recovered. The partial recovery that has materialized has been quite uneven, favoring growth of corporate profits and stock prices over employment and wage growth, while wide discrepancies persist in regional economic health…. 57 percent of surveyed American adults believed the United States was still in a recession…. Early into the recovery, roughly 11 million jobs were needed to restore the unemployment rate to pre-recession levels. Today, that number stands at an improved, but still staggering 7 million jobs needed…. The economy has added 198,000 jobs per month on average over the last year…. If this pace of hiring is sustained, it will take nearly another five years to restore pre-recession employment rates…. The unemployment rate has been an exceptionally misleading economic indicator in recent years, primarily falling because workers have been dropping out of the labor force, not because a rising share of the population is employed. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that nearly 6 million workers are still “missing” from the labor force because of the lack of jobs…. In the year before the Great Recession… 79.9 percent; in May, only 76.4 percent of prime-age workers were employed, and less than one-third of the decline from the Great Recession has been recovered…