Ezra Klein on our slow recovery from the Great Recession

From today's Washington Post, a not terribly upbeat look at historical trends in economic recoveries:

This White House has "vilified industries," complains the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. America is burdened with "an anti-business president," moans the Weekly Standard.

Would that all presidents were this anti-business: According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, corporate profits hit $1.37 trillion in the first quarter -- an all-time high. Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Business spending jumped 20 percent last quarter and is up by 13 percent against 2009. And the Obama administration has cut taxes for small businesses and big ones alike. Maybe the president could be anti-me for a while. I could use the money.

The reality is that America's supposedly anti-business president has led an extremely pro-business recovery. The corporate community has recovered first, and best. The populist tone that conservative magazines and business groups decry is partly in reaction to this: As corporate America's position is getting better and better, the recovery is looking shakier and shakier. Unemployment is high. Housing looks perilously close to a double dip. Job growth is weak. Businesses aren't hiring. The 71,000 jobs the private sector added in July aren't sufficient to keep up with population growth, much less cut into the ranks of the unemployed.

That is the catch-22 of the recovery: Businesses will start hiring when the economy recovers. And the economy will start to recover when businesses start hiring.

And this:

Not all recessions are created equal. Recessions caused by financial crises take a lot longer to dig out of than their more common cousins. One is like the flu. The other, a car crash. When the flu goes away, you're good. When a collision spins to a stop, that's when the long, slow process of healing begins.

In "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff study every financial crisis of the past 800 years. It's an exhaustive study, and its conclusions are depressing for a country that believes itself exceptional even in its suffering: We're not special.

If you consider unemployment, housing prices, government debt and the stock market, Rogoff says, "the U.S. is just driving down the tracks of a typical post-WWII deep financial crisis." In some areas, we're even a bit ahead of the game: Economic output usually falls by 9 percent. We held the drop to 4 percent.

Even the unevenness of our recovery is predictable. "Housing and employment come back much slower than equity and gross domestic product," Reinhart says. GDP usually falls for two years and then recovers. Equity can move even faster, which helps explain corporate America's rapid revival. But employment tends to fall for five years. And housing? That's usually a six-year slide.