The Center for Economic and Policy Research has a grim look at the harm a recession would wreak in the labor market. "Labor market recessions," they remind us, "last far longer than the technical recessions declared by the NBER. Long after financial markets and employers have begun to recover from an economic downturn, workers continue to suffer." Their paper offers projections for both a mild-to-moderate recession and a severe one, and I've made the section on unemployment into a graph. Series 1, the blue bars (how do I name series in Excel?), show estimates for a mild to moderate recession. Series 2, the red bars, demonstrate the effects of a severe downturn. Neither looks promising, but the power and length of a severe recession's impact on the labor is pretty sobering:
Worrying stuff.
Worrying stuff. 
