Please Mind the Gap!

The above chart culled from a posting at Kevin Drum's MotherJones blog, illustrates what has been discussed substantially since the inception of the 2008 global financial meltdown, but has not been widely understood amongst the general population.  If growth averages at or below 2% for the remainder of the decade, unemployment will remain nearly twice at which it was during the 1990's and much of the 2000's.  Similar to Japan's continuing economic malaise, America appears to entering a period of turbulence in which as much as 10-years of marginal or no economic growth will occur.

Both Harvard's Ken Rogoff and Yale's Robert Shiller have also discussed the likelihood that neither America nor much of the Industrialized world will return to pre-recessionary growth levels within the short term.  Based on Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart's 2009 research on economic crisis's over the past 800-years, they state that a "slow, protracted recovery with sustained high unemployment is the norm in the aftermath of a deep financial crisis."  Given the weak stimulus package introduced by the Obama administration and the ascent of austerity economics amongst many European nations, there is no reasonable chance that on either side of the Atlantic unemployment will reside, economic output will markedly increase, or that the fiscal situation will improve by 2012.

Shiller notes that in Rogoff and Reinhart's examination, the following rates are derivable:

median annual growth rates of real per capita GDP for advanced countries were one percentage point lower in the decade following a crisis, while median unemployment rates were five percentage points higher.

With the introduction of further uncertainty, whether through China's economy crashing or other yet to be determined causes, the world is faced with grim economic prospects for the foreseeable future.