The Uneven Economic Recovery: Eleven Things We’ve Learned and Six Charts

On a day when President Obama talked about the economy and the financial system five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it’s worth being reminded about what has transpired in those years, taking into account the many revisions that have been made to the official statistics since that fateful day in September, 2008. For ease of exposition, I’ll list them individually.

1. The recession started before Wall Street went ape. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the contraction began in December of 2007, three months before Bear Stearns had to be rescued, and ten months before Lehman’s demise. What precipitated the recession was the burst of the real-estate bubble, not the troubles on Wall Street. (Of course, the two were connected, and what happened on Wall Street did make things a lot worse.)

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