What makes the current recession so bad? Other downturns have been more painful by some measures, but none since World War II has delivered so many severe blows to the economy at the same time.
Already it is the longest. The nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, which determines when the U.S. economy slips into recession, says the downturn began in December 2007, 19 months ago. That makes it longer than the wrenching, 16-month recessions of 1973-75 and 1981-82.
The unemployment rate is approaching the peak seen in the 1981-82 recession, and the scope of job losses is the worst since the 1948-49 recession. The decline in gross domestic product is the deepest since the 1957-58 downturn, and Americans haven't seen so much of their wealth evaporate since the Great Depression.
The NBER defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months."
Among the gauges the organization watches are GDP and employment, as well as income, sales and industrial output. Even if the current recession is, as many economists believe, at or near its end, it already looks worse than its postwar predecessors.
With a dwindling number of people who remember the Great Depression, the 1981-82 recession is many Americans' high-water mark for economic pain. To tame that era's rampant inflation, the Federal Reserve pushed short-term interest rates above 20%, slamming the brakes on the economy. Millions lost their jobs, pushing the jobless rate to 10.8%.
While the unemployment rate isn't yet as high as in the early 1980s, the job losses associated with this recession already have been deeper because the downturn started with a lower unemployment rate than in the 1981-82 slump. Last month, there were 6.7 million fewer Americans working than in December 2007, when employment peaked -- a 4.7% decline, compared with 3.1% in 1981-82.
"In terms of employment, we're now way past 1982 and we're just about to cross the worst postwar recession, which was 1948," says Stanford University economist Bob Hall, who heads the NBER's recession-dating group.
In 1948, the demand that built up during World War II rationing programs had been sated. Companies, left holding more inventory than they could sell, throttled back production and laid off workers. The recession that began that year pushed payrolls down by 5.2%. Jobs recovered quickly, however, after the excess inventory was cleared away.
In contrast, the past two recessions, in 1990-91 and in 2001, saw payrolls decline long after the economy began recovering. That lagging drop is a shift in the way jobs respond to downturns that economists worry will continue.
Recent downturns have also been less abrupt, in part because the manufacturing sector, which responds to trouble by slashing production, is no longer as large a part of the economy. The declines in GDP -- the value of all goods and services produced -- associated with the 1990-91 and 2001 recessions were slight.
That makes this recession's decline in GDP striking.
Through the first quarter, GDP was down 3.1% from the peak it reached last year. The only post-World War II recession more severe was in 1958, when the United States was a manufacturing powerhouse. After consumer spending cooled in response to Fed rate increases, manufacturers ratcheted back, sending GDP down 3.7%.
But the Fed cut rates, and the economy recovered quickly, making the downturn one of the briefest ever.
"A normal postwar recession ends when the Fed thinks it's done enough to fight inflation," says Brad DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley.
But this downturn was set off by a housing and credit collapse, making Fed rate cuts less effective in spurring growth.
Economists believe Friday's GDP report will show the economy contracted again in the second quarter and that, in combination with downward government data revisions, could make this recession's GDP drop even larger than 1958's.
The good news: This recession's drop in household income hasn't been nearly as severe as one of its predecessors. That is partly because many states have extended unemployment benefits. It also is because workers haven't seen their earning power eaten up by rising prices.
That wasn't the case in the recession that stretched from 1973 to 1975, when food and energy costs jumped. Adjusting for inflation, U.S. household income fell 5.3% during that period. In the current recession, it has fallen 3%.
But this recession has eaten away at Americans' wealth like never before.
Falling home prices have decreased the equity households have in their homes -- that is, the value of their homes minus what they owe on them -- by $5.1 trillion, a 41% drop. They also have lost trillions of dollars in the stock market. No other episode of wealth destruction since the 1930s comes close.
As households work to rebuild the stores of wealth they lost, they are spending less. Although spending has recovered a bit, it is still an inflation-adjusted 1.9% below its peak 2008 levels.
Only two other downturns have had comparable spending drops. In the 1953-54 recession, when Congress added to the Fed's inflation-fighting efforts by extending an unpopular tax on corporate profits, spending fell by as much as 3.3%. That drop was matched in 1980, after President Jimmy Carter, in an attempt to rein in inflation, persuaded the Fed to introduce stringent controls on the use of credit.
Reversing those policies, and getting spending moving again, was relatively easy. But reversing the drop in wealth isn't. That means that tepid consumer spending could be a drag on the economy for years to come.