in the US at present. But today we are aiming to be more modest -- time prevents everything from happening at once. The following table presents a summary of the NBER recessions since the 1930s. I selected the last four recessions to keep the analysis tractable in graphical terms -- that is, to make it user-friendly out here in blog land. I have detailed econometric models for each of the recessions since the Great Depression and I will reveal that at another time in another format. The following graph shows the annual changes in employment (vertical axis) against the annual real GDP growth rates (horizontal axis) from the first-quarter 1948 to the second-quarter 2012. The black line is a linear trend regression, which relates the annual growth in employment to the annual real GDP growth. The coefficient on the real GDP term for the whole sample is 0.4404, which means in English that for a 1 per cent change in annual real GDP growth, employment growth expands by around 0.44 of a percent. You can also gain some insight by seeing where the trend line cuts the x-axis -- which represents what we might consider to be an employment threshold -- the point after which real GDP growth stimulates employment growth. For the whole sample, the line cuts at around the zero mark, which means that employment growth will be stimulated at very low levels of real GDP growth. So there is an instant employment dividend for stimulus measures that