The most deflating thing about Friday's GDP report was not that the number for the second quarter of 2011 was disappointing, but that the revisions showed how weak the economy has been for years now. The official growth figure for Q2 was 1.3 percent, which was below an already-lowered consensus figure of 1.9 percent. But the figure for the first quarter was revised down to 0.4 percent, which is close to recessionary levels.
The recession itself, it turns out, was even worse than has been reported. We now know that the fourth quarter of 2008, the worst quarter of the Great Recession, saw a drop in GDP of a stunning 8.9 percent, the worst quarter on record since 1958.
This makes the aggregate totals turn from bleak to downright bad. Previously, the estimate for total change on GDP over the period from the fourth quarter 2007 - the onset of the recession - to the first quarter of 2011 had been reported as an increase of an average annual rate of 0.2 percent. Now the Bureau of Economic Analysis says that over that period, the economy actually shrank at an average annual decrease of 0.2 percent. That's nearly four years in which the economy has done nothing but lose ground.
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