When the government publishes new estimates of economic growth for the second quarter on Friday, it’s likely that the figures will show that the current economic recovery has outstripped the previous one, at least by one measure.
At the current late stage of the recovery, the cumulative growth in economic output is likely to be greater than it was at the same point in the recovery from the 2001 recession, which had already entered another downturn at that point.
That milestone won’t change the fact that the current economic recovery has been weak by historical standards.
But it does underscore that the recovery is now long. And it also means that one of the GOP’s frequent talking points, that the Obama recovery has been the weakest of the modern era, is now obsolete, or at least contestable.
As flagged by Princeton economist and former top Obama economic adviser Alan Krueger, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates that gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, grew at a 2.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter. If the Bureau of Economic Analysis confirms that on Friday with the official release of real GDP statistics, the economy will have grown more than 15 percent since the end of the recession, which the National Bureau of Economic Research dates to June 2009.
In contrast, the economy had grown just under 15 percent 28 quarters into the recovery that began in November 2001.
Complicating the analysis, however, is the fact that by that point, the fourth quarter of 2008, the U.S. had already been in a new recession for almost a full year and was experiencing the financial crisis.
So while the recovery from the 2001 recession, during the George W. Bush administration, was stronger, it also was shorter.
At just under 86 months, the current recovery is already well longer than the postwar average of 58.4 months, as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
