How Long Will the Economy Suck?

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You can make a pretty good case that the U.S. economy won’t truly recover until we finish deleveraging from the credit bubble of the aughts. Stuart Staniford takes a quick look at several methods of estimating how long that’s going to take, and comes up with the following: 15-25 years, 13 years, 10+ years, and 10-15 years. “All of these methods have problems,” he acknowledges, “and you can pick your poison. What they all have in common though is this: deleveraging will take at least a decade, and it could easily take 15-20 years. In the meantime, the economy is likely to be pretty choppy at best.”

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