For the first year after the publication of “The Return of the Great Depression,” there were numerous critics who gleefully cited the media reports of economic recovery. The green shoots that Ben Bernanke’s eagle eye had spotted appeared to have blossomed into genuine economic growth and the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the recession to be officially over in 2009. However, the persistence of high unemployment rates despite the best efforts of the statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to hide the decline and the growing number of defaulting homeowners tended to belie all of the good news.