Factories in the United States still to recover, six years after recession

It took less than a year for America's factory output to rebound from the 1991 recession. It took 3-1/2 years to bounce back from the 2001 recession. Now, six years clear of the Great Recession, manufacturing output still has not returned to the pre-crisis levels it reached in 2007, according to revised economic data from the US Federal Reserve.

The downward revisions highlight the persistent weakness in a sector that President Barack Obama has long called crucial to the health of the US economy and the fate of the middle class. They track with the ongoing poor employment numbers for manufacturing, which, since January 2013, has added fewer than half of the million jobs Obama promised the sector would create in his second term.

And they reflect a hit that wasdeeper than previously thought to defence and aerospace manufacturing as the result of Pentagon cuts and deficit-reduction measures Obama and Congress agreed to several years ago.

The revised data show manufacturing output grew by nearly two percentage points less than previously estimated in both 2012 and 2013, and by nearly one point less in 2014.

Output in defence and space equipment was revised even more dramatically downward: by four points in 2012, seven points in 2013 and 2.5 points in 2014. That coincides with the implementation of a series of curbs to the federal defence budget, including ones agreed to in a 2011 budget deal.

"You can clearly see the steep declines in defence and space equipment spending" in the revised data, said Chad Moutray, the chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers. A coming next wave of scheduled cuts, he added, "will have even larger impacts on manufacturers, as subsequent cuts will dig deeper into the meat of key programmes".