Still pretty damn awful

I think we're headed into a healthy recovery. That's not to say economic conditions right now aren't pretty dismal. Calculated Risk has a lot of great information. Here's a frightening graph. Note what a huge outlier the 2001 "jobless recovery" was. If the current recovery takes that shape there will be rioting in the streets. The best we can probably hope for is something like the post 1982 recovery (magenta I believe). Note that there was a 4-5 month period at the trough of that employment series where it was easy to believe that, while the job losses had ended, the economy wasn't going anywhere fast. I hope we'll reach that point by early next year, with pretty healthy job growth and declining unemployment beginning in summer.