Fed Officials: Recovery Could Take Six Years

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 5:17 PM

By: Dan Weil and Gene Koprowski

The Federal Reserve says it could be five to six years before we return to normal growth.

That’s according to Fed officials in the central bank’s latest economic forecast.

They expect unemployment, now 10.2 percent, to remain in a range of 6.8 to 7.5 percent through 2012.

"Business contacts reported that they would be cautious in their hiring and would continue to aggressively seek cost savings," Fed officials said in minutes from their most recent policy meeting.

“Businesses would be able to meet any increases in demand in the near term by raising their employees' hours and boosting productivity, thus delaying the need to add to their payrolls," the officials said.

"It is a slow-motion recovery," Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group, told The Washington Post.

"It sure doesn't look like the beginning of a normal, rapid recovery."

Economist David Rosenberg is even more pessimistic.

“We’re in a form of depression," Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff Associates, Inc., a Toronto wealth management firm, told CNBC.

"Depressions . . . typically happen after a prolonged period of credit excess morphs into a collapse, and you get asset deflation. We had asset deflation, and we had a contraction in private-sector credit."

Billionaire George Soros believes a “bloodlettingâ€