31/5/2014: One Chart of the Week, 5 charts of the last 5 years

If you see one chart this weekend, make it count. Here's a contender:

Source: https://twitter.com/okonomia/status/471713359424139264/photo/1

The above shows US GDP growth starting with the end of each recession from 1954 through the last one (where all growth indices are set at 100). And guess what: this time is different. Despite massive, un-parallel, unprecedented monetary expansion and QE, the current recession and recovery signal both - the sharpest decline from the pre-crisis peak and the shallowest recovery from the crisis trough. 

To confirm this - see the historical deviations from the potential GDP:

And this is not just about GDP. Here are changes in employment:

And unemployment:

These charts come from (except for the first one) http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3252.

And the famous chart from the CalculatedRisk blog tracking percentage of jobs losses:

That's right... all of this 'wealth creation' in the financial markets is hardly about the real economy... Which means that one day, either fundamentals will have to catch up with financial markets valuations (by growth vastly outstripping capital gains), or financial markets will have to scale down the cliff back to fundamentals (by financial markets correcting massively to the downside). Or both... Which one is the 'soft landing'? You guess...