Paul Krugman has an interesting post about whether we're in a Japan-style lost decade or not. He notes that Clive Crook in the Financial Times thinks we're flirting with the possibility.
For Krugman we're well beyond flirting — we've blown way past Weinerville on the road to regular hookups (my phrasing, of course; the Professor is more professional).
His evidence is this chart, the graph of employment-to-population ratio (click to see). Here's Krugman:
What you see isn’t a recovering economy that may be stumbling; you see an economy that has stopped its free fall, but hasn’t really been recovering at all.With "austerity" the word on every Beltway lip, we'll be lucky if that lower line doesn't fall further.
GP
