The Wall Street Journal ran a graph this weekend claiming, “The private sector is adding jobs … but the recovery is slower than in past cycles.” In fact, even though it is not fast enough, the rate of job growth is actually faster now than was the case at comparable points of the past two recoveries.
How did the Wall Street Journal get it wrong? The problem is that their graph indexes job growth to the start of the recession, not the start of the recovery. The economy stopped contracting at the end of the second quarter last year and has since expanded for four straight quarters. So June 2009 is a reasonable date to pick for the start of the recovery, although the “official” date has not yet been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Private sector job growth started six months after GDP started expanding in the current recovery. By contrast, in the 2001 recovery private sector job growth did not begin until 22 months after the official NBER end date of the recession, and in the 1991 recovery job growth did not start until 12 months after the official NBER end date of the recession.
Fonte: White House