Economist: Recovery at ‘half speed’
Professor Albert W. Niemi, dean of SMU's Cox School of Business and holder of the Tolleson Chair in Business Leadership, says “We are going to have several decades, nationally, of a depressed economy. It is mind boggling what is happening to the United States of America.”
By Rachel Gray
CUMBERLAND — While the nation’s financial outlook looks grim for another 15 years, the former dean of the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business said the South is gaining ground faster than other regions.
Albert Niemi Jr., now dean of Southern Methodist University’s business school in Dallas, returned once again to Cobb for the 2014 economic forecast breakfast Tuesday morning, hosted by the Bank of North Georgia at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.
Niemi said the global economic downturn that started in the fall of 2007 has been a slow and tedious road to recovery.
Although The Great Depression of the 1930s was worse, with a larger percentage of Americans jobless, the recovery was far quicker than what is being seen today, Niemi said.
“It used to be in the first 36 to 48 months of a recovery, you are growing at around 4 to 4.5 percent,” Niemi said. “So this recovery is a recovery at half speed.”
Niemi projects it will take until 2029 to reach the level of job creation needed in America to reach “full employment.”
“We are going to have several decades, nationally, of a depressed economy,” Niemi said. “It is mind boggling what is happening to the United States of America.”