The Wall Street Journal has a lovely graphic this morning illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. economic recoveries since World War II.
No surprise, the current recovery is long on weaknesses and short on strengths:
The graphic is based on a very similar one the IMF included in its recent overview of the U.S. economy (officially known as the 2011 Article IV Consultation). I’ve pasted the original IMF graphic below.
The IMF one is excellent, but it’s instructive to note the many ways the WSJ graphics team made it even better (e.g., by transposing the columns and rows):
What recovery?