The employment numbers that came out today show that the economy is still in the process of gearing down. The normalized peak plot below shows U.S. employment levels as a percentage of their peak level in the last 14 recessions back to the Great Depression (dark black line). Employment in our current recession (the heavy lime green line) is 4.7% lower than its peak back in December 2007. The only recession that looks like this since the Great Depression is the post WWII reduction in spending in 1945. It looks like the recession still has some room to run. Similar comparisons of GDP and stock prices are in my post from a month ago.
I studied economics, demography and economic history, and I believe the best science to describe the current situation on the macro level is a demographic economics.
The main problem between real goods and nominal goods is the different pattern of their reproduction and growth. Commonly the production of real goods will grow linearly (or logistic) but the savings (with interests) rise exponentially. And some day we are in a "Malthusian trap". It's like a hot-water heating system with a leak.
And what will the economists do then? The neoclassical enomist hopes greenly for self-healing of the broken pipe, the Keynesian economist pours water (= money) continuously in the system (with short success only).
Remember the Great Depression! Roosevelt undertook a typical Keynesian policy: "Because of the depression, the national debt as a percentage of the GNP had doubled under Hoover from 16% to 33.6% of the GNP in 1932. While Roosevelt balanced the 'regular' budget, the emergency budget was funded by debt, which increased to 40.9% in 1936, and then remained level until World War II, at which time it escalated rapidly." (Wikipedia)
What was the economic result? The Unemployment rate (% labor force) decreased only from 24.9% in 1933 to 19.0% in 1938. The end of the Great depression was achieved not until the end of WWII with a new global initialization of footrace between real goods and nonimal goods.