more manageable trade deficit in non-petroleum products is the best we can hope for at this point. In short, despite an improvement in the non-petroleum trade balance since the middle of 2011, rebalancing of the external accounts is not yet a certainty. Rebalancing continues to depend on the ability and willingness of the rest of the world to accept and manage the consequences of that rebalancing. Arguably, so far, so good, but the real tests may still be ahead. In February and March payrolls expanded by an average of 205,000 jobs each month, a pace that is probably sufficient to make progress toward reducing the still-elevated unemployment rate. But at that pace it will take about three years before we see the same number of jobs that existed as of December 2007. The significant lag between gross domestic product recovery and employment recovery has been particularly extreme in the wake of the most recent recession, but this pattern was a characteristic of the previous two recessions as well. You know the facts : In the post-WWII recessions up to 1989, the average time it took to regain recession-generated job losses was 10 months. The recovery time expanded to 23 months and 38 months in the recoveries following the 1990 -- 91 and 2001 recessions. And we are on track to shoot past those records this time around. Explanations abound, but one popular belief is that the answer hides somewhere within the somewhat ambiguous phenomenon labeled "globalization." A few weeks back,