New York Times headline: "Recession Officially Over, U.S. Incomes Kept Falling"

From the New York Times:

In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found.

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent...

During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

[PB: This means median household income has fallen twice as much as during the "recession."  This is frightening.]

The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing....

One reason pay has stagnated is that many people who lost their jobs in the recession — and remained out of work for months — have taken pay cuts in order to be hired again. In a separate study, Henry S. Farber, an economics professor at Princeton, found that people who lost jobs in the recession and later found work again made an average of 17.5 percent less than they had in their old jobs.

“As a labor economist, I do not think the recession has ended,” Mr. Farber said. “Job losers are having more trouble than ever before finding full-time jobs.”

Mr. Farber added that this downturn was “fundamentally different” from most previous ones. Historically, other economists say, financial crises and debt-caused bubbles have led to deeper, more protracted downturns. 

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Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/recession-officially-over-us-incomes-kept-falling.html