This recession compared to others

Catherine Rampell explains in The New York Times: The chart above shows job changes in the most recent recession compared with previous ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. The line has risen since last year, but still has a long way to go before the job market fully recovers to its pre-recession level. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5.6 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that doesn’t even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.