You know it's bad if the notorious deregulator, bad trade deal promoter, DLC Economist Larry Summers is calling the economy sick and halfway through a lost decade:
US is now halfway to a lost economic decade. In the past five years, our economy’s growth rate averaged less than one per cent a year, similar to Japan when its bubble burst. At the same time, the fraction of the population working has fallen from 63.1 per cent to 58.4 per cent, reducing the number of those in jobs by more than 10m.
Summers is right, if one takes the average GDP growth from 2006 to 2010, we have a whopping 0.96% GDP growth. We've also shown, in the unemployment report the employment participation rate is down the 1980's levels. Below are the number of payroll jobs since January 2001. That's over 11 years and we are down -1426 jobs.
