"Recovery" will mean non-collapse and poorer economic equilibrium

Some economist from the Royal Bank is saying that we're going to see 0.6% economic growth this year, which is a sight better than a 6% downturn she says. This is thanks to the massive spending on the part of the governments of the major industrialized nations. But Obama's stimulus package is felt to have been far too modest. Canada's herpercon government has a modest political slush-fund that they can't seem to get around to implementing. So it must be Europe, Japan and China who have opened the floodgates.

But what will a recovery look like given that much of the world economy was humming along on growing household debt and the speculative frenzy of the "mortgage-backed securities" and "credit default swaps"?

My guess is that by "recovery" our elites mean only that they will avert an economic meltdown and that the new economic equilibrium that will be established will be a far poorer version of the dismal showing of the past twenty years (which were a marked step-down from the progress of the 1950-1970s decades).

What makes that scenario unlikely though is the absence of two of the things that made economic growth (such as it was) possible in the 1990s and 2000-09 era: the "financialization" of a functioning manufacturing sector caused by corporate deregulation and, most importantly, the enormous growth of household debt. With no consumers and no real manufacturing the elites will be forced to rely on government debt and a lower level of household spending by an increasingly insecure workforce.

We can either have that or we can have a political-economic revolution.