CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

The American economy has finally reached the size it was before the recession began four years ago, according to the latest gross domestic product report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That may sound like good news, but it’s long overdue, and frankly not good enough. If the economy were functioning normally, it would be significantly greater today than it was before the recession began.

Here’s a look at the level of gross domestic product over the last decade:

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, via Haver Analytics

It has taken 15 quarters for the economy to merely recover the ground lost to the recession. That is significantly longer than in every other recession/recovery period since World War II. In the previous 10 recessions, the average number of quarters it took to return to the prerecession peak was 5.2, with a high of 8 quarters after the recession in the 1970s.

Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Vice President Joe Biden’s former economic adviser, has written up some additional thoughts on the significance of these numbers. He observes:

[R]egaining the peak is just a proximate goal. What we’ve really lost here is the trillions in output between potential GDP (how the economy would have done absent the recession) and actual GDP. That’s the actual cost of the downturn—the output, jobs, incomes, opportunities, even careers, that were lost in the Great Recession.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=277508087d92cd4686a91bf0b7dadfbe