Obviously, the immediate past recession was more costly in terms of jobs than any comparable recession since WWII.
The discouraging question is whether the job recovery curve looks more like the shallow "U" shape of the 2001 recession or all the others, which are "V" shaped.
You can make your own decision about which curve will manifest itself this time. But logic suggests the recovery will take a while, simply because the curve already looks more like 2001 than any of the other curves. Also, none of the other recoveries had to face the financial headwinds imposed by our shocking, and growing, deficits, which will crowd out private capital that is the fuel for business growth.
A rough guess, given the depth of losses, which are twice that of the 2001 recession, suggests it might take twice as long for the economy to return to the level of jobs it had when the recession started. That would be 40 months, or roughly 3.3 years from today.
But that assumes no additional fiscal drag from the deficits, and nobody seems to think that is reasonable. So some believe it might take six to eight years. As one might assume, this will make for sluggish sales growth.
In a business such as telecommunications, which irrespective of the recession was in the throes of a massive transformation of its core business model, which will in any case require replacement of perhaps 50 percent of its existing current revenue by new sources over a 10-year period, and perhaps another 50 percent of revenue over perhaps a 20-year period.
Those would challenges enough for virtually any industry, without the pressure of sluggish job and housing growth and high structural deficits. Normally, sluggish growth in the telecommunications business has lead to mergers and acquisitions, since one way to obtain growth in a sluggish market is to buy that growth in the form of acquired customer bases, revenues and assets.
One has to expect quite a lot of that in this environment.
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