This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 9, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The dissent into recession was sharp, but conventional in terms of job losses and

GDP decline.

The recovery, however, is considerably different, slower and with reduced job creation,

and government intervention explains a lot of that.

So says Mark Calabria, director of financial

regulation studies at the Cato Institute. In a typical recession what you see

at first is of course a significant job loss usually in the form of layoffs.

And at some point you, that peaks and we've already actually peaked the point in this recession where job losses have reached their height.

And then you start to get to a point where job creation starts to overwhelm that

and then you start to have positive job growth.

And so the real difference between this recession

and previous recessions has been, we saw a very typical pattern,

although certainly a deep and heavy pattern of job loss, and that has gone in line with

what we've seen in previous recessions in terms of declines in GDP at the same time, but you haven't

seen the corresponding growth in jobs that normally

accompanies not just coming out of recession, but also the level of economic

growth we were actually seen today in GDP. What does that relationship look like?

Well, typically you see a very close relationship.

What it's tended to be, and actually economists have come up with a name for it, they call

it Oken's law, and what it translates to being

...