The Exhaustion of the Cyclical Recession

Why isn’t anyone all gung-ho about the end of the recession, Times biz columnist Floyd Norris wants to know! History, he says, shows us that we always land on our feet. (I dunno, historically, I think people feel better when the jobs come back and when there’s money being made to offset spending mostly? But that’s just a suggestion from the man who just exhausted all the quarters in the change bowl on his last trip to the deli.) The downturns of ’91 and ’01 are being treated as stand-alone events-despite the fact that everyone keeps saying “the economy is cyclical,” and if I hear that one more time, stab me, but maybe why we’re not “overjoyed” at the “end” of the “recession” is because the last twenty years of economic history so clearly are cyclical. And maybe we don’t like this cycle! And the last down-swooping iteration of the cycle was a really devastating one-’01 took much longer to recover from than ’91, and when will “recovery” exist in the near future? ‘12? And how ugly will the downturn be in 2020, at the end of Vice President Bachmann’s economically-scorching world war? Also it’s hard to get stoked about “recovery” when the whole cyclical system bases its downturns on more and more destruction of middle-class financial lives and on further stratifying the rich and poor.