NYC Letter: Flashback -- Welcome to the Recovery!

Day 925 of CHOPE

June, take three:

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported the U.S. economy grew at a 1.9% clip over the first three months of 2011, in its third take on first-quarter gross domestic product.

July, take four:

The economy nearly stalled in the first half of 2011, reviving concerns of a double-dip recession, the Commerce Department said Friday.

Gross domestic product, the sum of goods and services produced in the country, expanded at a 1.3% annual rate in Q2, below the expected 1.7% pace. Q1 growth was slashed to a 0.4% rate from a previously reported 1.9% due to much slower inventory growth and a bigger trade gap.

That's an 80% differential. That's one mighty big slash.

Hey! Welcome to the recovery!

On the tail-end of last year's "Recovery Summer", Tim "Turbo Tax" Geithner took to the pages of the NYT to cheerily reassure us that -- despite the misery index -- we were all enjoying a counterfactual recovery.

WELCOME TO THE RECOVERY

OP-ED August 2, 2010 (NYT) - The recession that began in late 2007 was extraordinarily severe, but the actions we took at its height to stimulate the economy helped arrest the freefall, preventing an even deeper collapse and putting the economy on the road to recovery.

... From the start, President Obama made clear that recovery from a crisis of this magnitude would not come quickly and that the recovery would not follow a straight line.

Not really.

Business investment and consumption — the two keys to private demand — are getting stronger, better than last year and better than last quarter.

That went up in smoke a month later.

Even the surge in imports, which lowered the rate of increase of G.D.P., actually reflects healthy and growing American demand.

The trade deficit jumps nearly 33 percent in 2010. That's great news.

Private job growth has returned — not as fast as we would like, but at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries. Manufacturing has generated 136,000 new jobs in the past six months.

Unemployment was 9.5% when Mr. Geithner penned this vanity op-ed. Mr. Geithner's recovery was not only a jobless recovery, it was a net job loser.

The United States economy has lost more jobs than it has added since the recovery began over a year ago.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The downturn officially ended, and the recovery officially began, in June 2009, according to an announcement Monday by the official arbiter of economic turning points [scil., NBER]. ... But nonfarm payrolls are still down 329,000 from their level at the recession’s official end 15 months ago, and the slow growth in recent months means that the unemployed still have a long slog ahead.

That Mr. Geithner thought to title this fairy tale "Welcome To The Recovery" shows just how stupid Team Barry expects you to be.

CHOPE.

Check back in 2012.

Posted by Damian at August 3, 2011 11:45 PM