MSNBC: "No sustained response" to efforts by the government means "not a traditional recession"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Economic downturn defying solutions
Latest data raise fears of 'double dip,' if there ever was a recovery

The economy is still growing, but just barely. The latest wave of downbeat economic data, including Friday’s report on gross domestic product, have renewed fears that we could be headed for the second half of a “double dip” recession.

It is even possible that the apparent economic recovery is a mirage, and that the recession that began in December 2007 never really ended.

Increasingly it seems that the unprecedented measures taken in 2008 and 2009 to revive the economy are not working because the recession is unlike any this country has seen in the past 60 years.

“After all the monetary, fiscal and bailout stimulus, the economy should be roaring ahead, as would be the case if the economy were coming out of a normal garden-variety recession,” Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg wrote in a recent note to clients. “The fact that there has been no sustained response to all these efforts by the government to turn things around is testament to the view that this is not actually a traditional recession at all."

After the housing bust of 2007 and financial meltdown of 2008 brought a sharp contraction in growth, the government responded with time-tested policy responses. Those included $1 trillion of stimulus spending and tax cuts, together with the Fed’s $1.25 trillion cash infusion into a shaky mortgage market. For good measure, Congress approved $700 billion to bail out the battered banking system

The jolt of cash flowing through the system produced a surge of growth late last year that carried into 2010. That growth spurt prompted many economists, investors and policymakers to declare that a recovery was under way.

But a recent string of gloomy economic data has prompted second thoughts about the nature of this recovery. The latest read on the nation’s gross domestic product was revised sharply lower Friday. The government'sGDP data showed an anemic growth rate on 1.6 percent, from an initial reading of 2.4 percent.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38871203/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/

[DCKit]

1. They've told us it would be "V" or "L" shaped....

but it's got "W" written all over it.

[DCKit]

2. Dupe

[WI_DEM]

3. If we have had 4 quarters of growth then technically the recession did end but we need to do more

to keep the economy from dipping back into recession--the GOP and blue dogs don't want it but really Obama and dems should be fighting for more stimulus this summer--it would actually be a good election year issue because unemployemnt is the #1 issue among voters.

[HillbillyBob]

4. If these damn guys are so smart..wtf didn't they see it coming to

start with?

My partner and I saw it YEARs ago coming..ever since rayguns drizzlin shits economics. Sooner or later our outsourced jobs and the pigs stealing err privatizing all of our infrastructure has destroyed this country and any faith in it. May they all die on small planes and see it coming. Yes I wish them ill they have fucked us all over for years and gotten rewarded for it.