Don’t look now, but the economic recovery that barely exists in the eyes of many Americans is 2 years old.
By historical standards, that should be a milestone signifying robust economic expansion and strong job gains, especially in light of the severity of the Great Recession, which officially ended in June 2009.
But instead of mimicking dramatic turnarounds that followed similarly bruising downturns in the 1970s and 1980s, the upswing looks more like the modest rebounds after milder recessions in the early 1990s and 2001. Like the recent slump, those were tainted by credit crises that gummed up critical gears of the economy.