Not a normal recession in the US

In Fox Attacks Clinton's DNC Speech With Scrambled Jobs Numbers Justin Berrier fact checks Fox News claims that Ronald Reagan oversaw a larger drop in unemployment in his first term than Barack Obama has done. There are a couple of interesting points in the article:

One contributing factor to the discrepancy is that the recession Obama faced was far more severe than the one Reagan faced.

The Congressional Budget Office explained that Reagan's recession was caused by an effort to reduce inflation, which allowed Reagan to begin a recovery by lowering interest rates, a solution that is not possible now due to rates that are already near zero.

Further, the recession faced by President Obama was caused by a financial crisis, not a monetary adjustment. As several economists have noted, recessions associated with financial crises are more severe and hamper recovery far more than other kinds of economic downturns. Writing for Bloomberg View, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff explained:

    "After a normal recession (which for the average post-World War II experience in the U.S. lasted less than a year), the economy quickly snaps back; within a year or two, it not only recovers lost ground but also returns to trend.

    "After systemic financial crises, however, economies of the postwar era have needed an average of four and half years just to reach the same per capita gross domestic product they had when the crisis started. We find that, on average, unemployment rates take a similar time frame to hit bottom and housing prices take even longer. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, economies on average needed more than a full decade to regain the initial per capita GDP."