The Millennial View: The economy’s not so bad

Donald Trump supports opening up the libel laws, and defending those he sees as victims of nasty public defamation campaigns.

“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.

[...] 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.

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.

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.

The United States was one of 12 countries that suffered a systemic financial crisis in 2007-2008.

Three countries — Greece, Italy and Ukraine — were so scarred by the crisis that forecasts going all the way out to 2021 still don’t show them regaining their lost ground.

Compared with the United States, many European countries engaged in much more draconian austerity measures, which often turned out to be counterproductive.

[...] Americans were able to wipe out their unpayable private debts much more quickly than many of their counterparts abroad did, because mortgages here are more likely to be non-recourse loans.