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Weekly Wrap: GDP, the recovery and a special guest

Kai Ryssdal Jan 27, 2012

Leigh Gallagher from Fortune magazine and Sudeep Reddy from the Wall Street Journal discuss this week’s major headlines on Wall Street.

On the current economic mood:

Leigh Gallagher: In a way, people are forgetting that we’ve been through a whole lot of superlatives. We went through the worst crisis and real estate prices dropped more than they did during the Depression, so the notion that we’re going to have a super strong recovery anytime about now is kind of — you know, it’s a little bit unfounded.

On whether this economic recovery is ‘L-shaped’:

Sudeep Reddy: L-shaped is what everyone’s been talking about for a while; everyone was hoping for a V-shaped recovery before. Now we’re just going to have for sure a disappointing recovery. We’re four years from the point of the recession starting, and now the Fed’s telling us we’ve got at least three more years of this extraordinary action. The really worrying thing now is everything seems to look a little better on the surface — GDP numbers look good on the surface, but under the surface, there are all sorts of problems; jobs numbers look better on the surface but we’ve got this huge problem in the labor market.

For more analysis and to find out who the secret guest is, listen to the full audio above.

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