Daily Times

Donald Trump supports opening up the libel laws, and defending those he sees as victims of nasty public defamation campaigns. Well, I can suggest at least one libel victim that needs a champion: the US economy. America’s economy gets a bad rap these days, thanks in no small part to Republican politicians’ constant smears and insults. “This is the worst recovery after a deep recession since World War II,” declared Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Fox Business Network on Tuesday. He’s used similar language on CNBC, PBS, Fox News and other outlets in recent days, as have other conservative commentators. This data point, Republicans claim, is an indictment of the Obama administration. It’s also supposed to persuade voters to hold their noses and rally around the GOP’s bigoted new standard-bearer and the alternative economic vision he supposedly represents. Except this assessment of our economy is completely wrong. Or at the very least, highly misleading. In fact, if you go by the historical record, we may have exceeded expectations for where we should be this many years after a severe financial crisis. And relative to most other countries that weathered a crisis when we did, we’re doing spectacularly well. It’s true that the Great Recession has been followed by a slow and shallow or?recovery. Rather than bouncing back with annual growth rates in the 3 4 percent range, as we might have hoped, we’ve been trudging along at about 1.5 to 2.5 percent. Hiring has lately disappointed, too. This record seems pretty damning. Except, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not. See, it’s not really fair to compare today’s recovery with any other post-World War II recovery, because this is the first time since World War II that we’ve had to recuperate from a systemic financial crisis. (The last systemic financial crisis in the United States led to the Great Depression – which was before World War II.) And financial crises are uniquely traumatic events for economies, according to the work of Harvard researchers Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. Recoveries following systemic financial crises, Rogoff told me in an email, are always “far slower and more protracted” than those following normal recessions. How slow and protracted? Well, in a recent paper, the authors examined the aftermath of 100 financial crises spanning the past century-and-a-half. They found that, on average, it takes a country more than eight years to return to its pre-crisis level of per capita income. In the United States, following the 2007-2008 financial crisis, we achieved that milestone in “only” seven years, according to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. We beat not just the (admittedly dismal) historical average, but the records of most of our crisis-stricken contemporaries, too.