So it wasn't a depression after all

So it wasn't a depression after all

There's no getting away from it.

Growth at an annualised clip of 3.5% in the U.S. economy during the three months to the end of September is a remarkable achievement.

President Obama was quick to say so on Thursday, albeit well aware there's still a long way to go.

"While this report represents real progress the benchmark I use to measure the strength of our real economy is not just whether our GDP is growing ... but whether we're creating jobs, whether families are having an easier time paying bills, whether our businesses are hiring and doing well."

But the growth figure's been achieved with hardly a single new job being created in the private sector.

Indeed reports suggest the White House may have exaggerated the number of jobs created by the stimulus package by up to ten times.

I went to an employment centre in north east Washington DC to hear from job seekers who seemed pleased to hear the economy's on the mend but frustrated it's not helping them yet.

One, a middle aged female teacher who’d been laid off after a lifetime working in DC schools, told me, “yes, I'm very bitter.”

An unemployed man who's orginally from Ghana in west Africa told me, “It's good but not for us poor people,” while a female university student who is fed up watching her friends and family fail to get jobs said, “Barack Obama needs to do more work, a lot of people don't have work. A lot of people don’t have food.”

Nonetheless, if Thursday's GDP figure isn't revised downward too much, it looks as if the billions in stimulus paid off, even if many Americans aren't benefitting.

The pay out included Obama's $787 billion dollar stimulus package, the government’s Cash for Clunkers new car program that paid $4,000 to encourage owners of old style gas guzzlers to trade up to a new model, and a big tax break for first time home buyers.

Then, of course, there was the central bank which has pumped in trillions of dollars to keep interest rates low.

Professor Max Fraar Wolff of the New School in New York told Al Jazeera:

"In the polls we saw earlier this week, 81 percent of Americans say they still feel like they're in a recession and I don’t think today’s news will do anything to change that.”

The GDP figure gave a two percent boost to the U.S. stock market on Thursday but analysts point out that's mainly because of a round of strong company earnings, brought about by firms cutting jobs to save money.

Americans are asking, is this the economic recovery we've been yearning?

The answer is it's too early to tell.

Whilst it's unlikely the U.S. economy will slip back into recession, without government stimulus, we're unlikely to see economic growth of 3.5% in the months ahead.

But the real recovery will only come once CEOs have the confidence to take people on again. Economists reckon that may not happen for another year.

By the wa,y the 3.5% growth doesn’t necessarily mean the recession has now ended – though it probably does.

We’ll need to see two quarters of positive growth and hear from the Massachusetts based National Bureau of Economic Research to know for certain. It’ll take them a year to decide.

So all things being equal, the recession in the U.S. probably ended sometime in August or September 2009 – about twenty months after it started in December 2007.

One thing is for sure though, the nastiness of 2008/2009 was not – as many had feared – a depression like the one that crippled the global economy in the 1930s.

Ironically, however, Thursday’s GDP data was released eighty years to the very day of the infamous Wall Street crash of 1929 that many feel started the Great Depression.

Spooky!

JT, AJ, Washington