The recovery that never was -- According to the Left, we are 3.5 yrs into the recession and still no recovery. (charted evidence)

Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. Follow him on Twitter: @DKThomp.
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The 4 Scariest Economic Graphs I've Seen This Year (from The Atlantic)

By Derek Thompson

Aug 2 2011, 8:17 PM ET 37

This is a remarkable sequence of pictures from Calculated Risk showing that no major economic indicator has returned to its pre-crisis level. In other words, after two years of recovery, not a single key broad measure of the economy has actually recovered.

The ingenious thing about these graphs, which I've never before seen, is that they compare key recession indicators as a share of their pre-recession peaks. The outcome reveals each recession in the last 50 years as a kind of hanging icicle. Ours is by far the longest, and we don't yet know when we'll trace our way back to the 2007. Here's why I don't expect the path up to get much smoother in the near future.