The Lo$t Decade: U.S. Economy Living In 2002

The U.S. is living in the past.

2002 to be exact, this according to an analysis from The Economist based on data from the International Monetary Fund and the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

“The Economist has constructed a measure of lost time for hard-hit countries. It shows that Greece’s economic clock has been turned back furthest: it has been rewound by over 12 years. Elsewhere in the euro area, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain have lost seven years or more. Britain, the first country forced to rescue a credit-crunched bank, has lost eight years. America, where the trouble started, has lost ten ”

“Our clock uses seven indicators of economic health, which fall into three broad categories. Household wealth and its main components, financial-asset prices and property prices, are in the first group. Measures of annual output and private consumption are in the second category. Real wages and unemployment make up the third. A simple average of how much time has been lost in each of these categories produces our overall measure.”

 Read the rest from The Economist