The Great Recession, as we call it now, began in August 2007, after the U.S.housing bubble began to burst. It went global a couple of months later before the bottom fell out completely in September 2008.
And while some say the crisis ended in June 2009, a lot of still unemployed people (including some still employed who thought they might be retired by now) might take issue with that date.
Bankruptcies, falling home values, and plummeting stocks marked the worst economic downturn this country's seen since the 1930s. Real GDP tumbled, capital investment vanished, and income levels fell. One Bloomberg report from 2009 estimated that, globally, companies saw a loss of more than $14 trillion in value.
But it's the unemployment rate that gets the most headlines—and most directly affects the broker business. The employment market really began hemorrhaging jobs in December 2007. By September 2008, the jobless rate really started to tick up, with the bankruptcy of the venerable investment firm Lehman Brothers shaking the market to its core. By October 2009, the unemployment rate reached an ugly milestone, hitting 10 percent, before slowly ticking back down.
And while these figures have understandably received a lot of attention, they don't come anywhere near The Depression-era levels of 25 percent. But what's made this downturn—and subsequent recovery—so historically different is the glacial pace of job recovery. Three-and-a-half years after that 10 percent peak, the jobless rate still lingers around 7.6 percent. And this is after hundreds of thousands have given up on the job market altogether.
According to Investors.com, to offer just one example, roughly 5.4 million people gave up on the job market and headed for the federal disability rolls since President Obama took office at the height of the crisis.
It's the malingering jobless rate, and a growing number of uninsured, that have driven far-reaching legislation, such as Frank-Dodd and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Finally, most of the jobs lost during the great recession—nearly two-thirds, in fact—paid middle-class wages. And this recovery has been predominately powered by lower-paying jobs, which of course typically means lower levels of employee benefits, if any at all.
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