The Mother Of All Jobless Recoveries

The trade numbers were much better than expected. Brad DeLong predicts the future:

Now that we have the May trade figures, the modal forecast is (i) an economy that was flat in the second quarter relative to the first quarter, (ii) an economy that starts to grow relatively slowly in the third quarter, and (iii) an unemployment rate that keeps rising for another one and a half to two years--like it did in 1992 and 2002--as the old-fashioned business-cycle productivity-employment pattern is broken once again. Bob Hall's [National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)] committee is likely to proclaim that recovery began sometime in the second quarter, but it won't feel like a recovery to workers (as opposed to asset owners) for quite some time to come.