The most interesting thing about that graph (which I’ve seen many times before) is to take notice of how the shape of the recovery curves has changed since a) we’ve gone to a completely fiat currency, which b) has allowed the Fed to have complete control over monetary policy. As we can see, the post ‘73 recessions have much more “rounded” recovery curves, and every recession has required longer and longer periods of time to recover from, albeit with less sharp declines in unemployment.
This has resulted in the bottom, 2007, curve, which shows that the ability of the economy to purge itself of mis-allocation of capital has now been so impeded that it cannot recover and employment is taking forever to recover.
If you look at the last four, seems to be a downward trend, greatly exacerbated in the current one.
Great Society, anyone?
1981, 1990, 2001, and 2007 have been the four longest.
Eventually, probably soon, one of them will take forever.
When you don’t recover from a severe illness, you die.
I’ve often found that graph disturbing. In the past 30 years each recovery has taken longer and longer to recover from. 31 mo, 46 mo... the current one might well taken an “infinite” amount of time.