2008 GDP in 2005 dollars didn't recover until 2011, and only just barely so.
Per the latest revisions from the Bureau of Economic Analysis here, real GDP in 2005 chained dollars:
2008 $13.162 trillion
2009 12.758
2010 13.063
2011 13.299
2012 13.558.
I've written that I think we had a depression starting in 2008 when GDP declined from the previous year 2007, and that the depression ended based on reports of real GDP, but perhaps looked at from the point of view of chained 2005 dollars the depression ended just last year and not in 2010 as I've maintained previously.
Al Lewis for MarketWatch here disagrees:
It’s just that like radiation — it’s invisible.
We’ve called it the recovery, the jobless recovery, the slogging recovery and more recently the fading recovery. We’ve measured modest growth in our nation’s gross domestic product to record that our so-called Great Recession ended in June 2009. And now we are saying that if this disappointing growth suddenly disappears, as currently feared, we will be in a new recession.
There is nothing more depressing than hearing about a new recession when you haven’t fully recovered from the last one. I take heart in suspecting that in a still-distant future, historians will look back with clarity and call this whole rotten period a depression.
Lewis' remarks at least show that calling what we've been through a "depression" is now possible in polite company.
I'd call that . . . progress!
