Clearly, the recent recession is the deepest of the five in every aspect, and the recovery time looks likely to become the longest.
      We can take comfort that GDP is still improving, while the new unemployment claims and total employment improved as well.
      Note that the previous longest recession started in Feb. 2001 and featured what we then called the "Jobless Recovery," long and sloooooooow. Further, in the 2001 recession the GDP barely slipped at all, as recessions go, but the Employment was still badly hurt four years later.

      Overall the present data is encouraging, and becoming more so. None the less, perhaps we could benefit from more stimulus spending, especially Federal grants to State governments which are still laying off workers. GDP won't rise faster if the employment picture doesn't get better.
      Some commentators are calling this another jobless recovery. On the one hand, the number of new jobs added is already comparable to the number added after the 2001 recession. On the other hand, the rate of adding jobs (slope of the line) is slow, comparable to the 'jobless' post-2001 recovery and much less than the rate of the prior three recoveries.

      U-6 is less often reported in the media. This counts all the unemployed people in the U-3 tally, plus those who are working part time but would prefer to be working full time, plus those who "have become discouraged", i.e., those who can see that there's no work there to make a job search worth the trouble. This is the broadest measure of unemployment, and it is quite a bit higher than the headline number.
      U-6 arguably gives the best picture of the potential workers who don't have earnings to spend, and are thus a part of aggregate consumer demand (purchasing power) which is missing now compared to the last period of full employment.
      The U-6 data has only been gathered since 1994, so it only catches two full recessions and the tail of the one before that.

      As implied above, one way to view unemployment is the missing consumer spending power compared to a fully healthy economy. Recently the BLS has measured and published the aggregate weekly payroll earnings of all employees. This is basically the same as the aggregate spending power of all consumers. It appears to be a good concurrent indicator, and has the benefit of being available with less of a lag than the GDP estimates.
      Good news: it is rising steadily, and is well above the levels of the official start of the recession. Sadly, since this stat is new, the data is only available for this most recent recession and current recovery. I've put it in the same format as the recession-comparison charts above so that the time scale will be the same. I'll keep looking for an alternate source for the data for the prior recessions.

      Recoveries, like recessions, are self-reinforcing (positive feedback). More workers means more consumers with more money. More consumer spending means need for more new new workers, who will once again have money to spare. And so it goes.

Data come from the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Labor Statistics (Employment, Unemployment, Payroll) and Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP), Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (LEI), and the US Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (Claims).

      The big jump in total cost in July 2008 was from Indy Mac. The rate of new failures and the total cost of those failures is leveling off. Let's hope that lasts. There were no FDIC bank closures in 2005 or 2006.

The inflation charts are updated monthly, near mid-month, after the BLS announces new data.

      These charts show US Urban Consumer Price Inflation (CPI-U), the most commonly used measure of inflation.  CPI-U is known as "Headline" inflation, while CPI-U excluding Food & Energy (xF&E, thus CPI-U xF&E), is called "Core" inflation.

      Food & Energy are excluded because they are volatile, meaning that those prices change a lot while the prices of most other consumer goods change much more slowly.  They are volatile, but the volatility does not always average to zero over just a few years..  After the recession-induced huge drop in energy costs in the past year, the Food & Energy component average is very near zero.  Over the four prior years, though, Food and Energy prices were rising on average nearly 1% year-to-year.  During that period it made no sense to simply omit that completely from Core, effectively treating the Food and Energy inflation as if it was zero;   it would have been smarter to compensate for the volatility by smoothing (running average) the price changes.

      Here CPI-U, CPI-U xF&E, and Food & Energy are the same as above.  In addition, there is a smoothed curve of Food & Energy, and a new total of Core inflation plus smoothed Food & Energy.