We are exactly 7 months in from the Dow Bottom that everyone now refers to as the economic nadir of this recession.  What we hope to make a now monthly feature of this site, now continues, building on our last look half a year into the recovery in the month of September.  The key questions remain, how is the recovery holding up, will it continue, will it be jobless, and will it be widespread.  We traditionally subscribe to the notion of a picture is worth a thousand words so we’ll be answering each of these questions quite simply: with a graph.

NOTE: Click on the graph to see a larger picture.

1. How is the recovery holding up? After the week that just passed it seems as if the recovery just keeps on continuing: While last month it seemed as if the recovery was in fact losing steam, now it seems like we just keep on hitting highs.  With earnings season ahead of us, we’ll be looking to see if this can continue.

2. Will the recovery continue? Simply put, Yes.  More complicated answer: Yes but not as quickly as it has so far.  The reason for this, as can be seen by the graph below is that volatility has decreased significantly and consumer confidence has undoubtedly flat lined.  The decrease in volatility, does indicate that there won’t be huge corrections but it also indicates that the march back to 14,000 will take a lot longer than the plummet down to 6,500 since markets are less receptive to news.

3. Are we seeing a Jobless Recovery? No, but we’re not seeing a recovery led by job creation either.  While we have made clear that the job situation in this recession is not much worse than that of comparable recessions, we also see ample reason to believe that jobs will be slower than other economic indicators and will be one of the last indicators to see substantive recovery as unemployment continues to increase.  This is primarily a result of unemployment’s innate role as a lagging indicator since companies only begin hiring after seeing substantial recovery in their own pockets.  As you can see, we have yet to witness a truly substantial turnaround with respect to the job situation.

4. Is the recovery widespread? It remains incredibly widespread, all though the amount of recovery varies substantially by the indicator one looks at.  Take a look at percent change across the board and the substantive increases since March in almost all economic indicators.