The Great Deleveraging: Six And A Half Lost Years

Friday’s jobs report came in much as expected: payrolls rose by two hundred and seventeen thousand in May, and the unemployment rate remained steady at 6.3 per cent. That confirms what we already knew: following a weather-related hiccup in the first three months of the year, the economy is once again growing at a modest pace.

The big news in the report was that finally, almost five years after the Great Recession officially ended, the over-all number of jobs in the economy has returned to where it was before the slump began. In January, 2008, two months before Bear Stearns almost collapsed and had to be rescued, 138,365,000 people were employed in the non-farm economy. By February, 2010, the employment figure had fallen to 129,655,000—roughly 8.7 million jobs had been lost. Only now have they all been regained. The payrolls figure in May was 138,463,000.

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