ECONOMY

Obama: Recession Isn't Over Yet

Despite improvements, "many more months" of recovery.

The end is in sight—sort of. In his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama said that Friday's government report on the gross domestic product revealed that the recession was “even deeper than anyone thought” when he took office, and the country still has "many more months" before it's fully recovered. “Important steps that we have taken over the last six months have helped put the brakes on this recession,” he said. “But history shows that you need to have economic growth before you have job growth.” (The jobless rate was 9.5 percent in June, and economists anticipate it will hit 10 percent by early 2010.) Still, the same government report showed that in recent months the economy overall has done "measurably better than expected," Obama pointed out, and stressed that innovation is the key to economic growth. "Innovation has been essential to our prosperity in the past," he said, "and it will be essential to our prosperity in the future."