Artificial wealth

[eridani]

Average people have had the illusion of increased wealth through the bubble economy ever since 1980. This last bubble really was different, though. Intriligator and Martin explain with a lot of clear graphs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-d-intriligator-and-r-kyle-martin/the-rise-and-fall-of-arti_b_261392.html

Now that consumer spending appears to have stabilized at an anemic minimum level sufficient for day-to-day survival, we should now look to the future of the recovery. As a starting point we evaluate previous recoveries to see how long it has taken to regain full employment after levels of high unemployment. In Figure 10 presents the average unemployment rate for the civilian labor force 16 years and over. Unemployment peaked at 9.7 percent in 1982, and it took five years for unemployment to drop to 5.3 percent in 1989.

However, in the 1980s, residential real estate was fairly valued when measured against GDP, so in the next section we take a critical look at how long the recovery will take.