FT Alphaville:

The Oregon Office of Economic Analysis has ventured an update to Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff’s ‘This Time it’s Different‘, the seminal work on financial crises of the past – and their related analysis on the aftermath of financial crises.

The OOEA* uses both updated and revised data and, mostly, confirm that while things have of course gotten worse, they’re still inside the historical norms. For example, equity price declines:

Indeed, for most of the key measures used by Reinhart and Rogoff, the OOEA finds newer data only reconfirms the US is experiencing a “garden variety” of financial crisis, as the original works indicated.

The summary of the new data comes out like this:

However… there’s one area in that list in which the current US appears to be significantly better than the crises past: unemployment.

While it looks terrible in the context of past US recessions…

So far, at least, the US has done reasonably well in terms of unemployment, when compared to global precedents:

It probably won’t be much comfort to anyone in these economic times, but interesting, nonetheless.

Interesting comments, like:

In addition to governments messing with the definition of unemployment, US has less social support than other countries, so impact of unemployment is far greater. Limited time benefits being one example, and health insurance being tied to your job an even larger one, means losing your job can be catastrophic in a way that is inconceivable in Japan, Spain or Scandinavia. This will provide further amplification of the impact of recession on US consumers.