Great Graphic: US Job Growth Compared with Past Downturns

This Great Graphic was posted on Barry Ritholtz's Big Picture blog, which he found on Calculated Risk.   We have run this chart before and we thought an update would be useful.  It shows how frustratingly slow the employment recovery has been in this cycle.  At the current pace, it will take the better part of the next year and a half to fully recoup the job loss of the Great Recession.  

The recovery from the 2001 recession took about 15 months longer than the recovery from the 1990 downturn to recoup the jobs lost.   The 1990 recovery took about four months longer than the 1981 recovery to gain the jobs lost in the downturn, which was longest amount of time until then,  

As we have noted before, one of the reasons for the under-performance now can be traced to the public sector.  In past recoveries, the public sector added jobs.  Now it is cutting jobs.   The private sector job growth has been better than the overall jobs growth.   Over the past three years, the private sector has added a net 180k jobs per month.  The government sector has lost 20k on average per month.  That represents a loss of 720k jobs.  For sure this would still be a "jobless recovery", but it would reduce the amount of time to recoup the jobs lost by around 4 months.