From time to time, one polling company or another asks Americans whether they believe the Great Recession has ended. A substantial portion of them say no, and that opinion is correct. Some respondents even say the United States is in a depression.

A widely covered report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Center for Household Financial Stability states that:

Average household wealth in real terms, contrary to recent headlines, has not fully recovered; indeed, it is only about halfway back to prerecession levels

And, for some groups, the situation is even worse:

While many Americans lost wealth because of the recession, younger, less-educated and/or African-American and Hispanic families lost the most, in percentage terms.

Some of the results of this analysis should have been expected. Other research has shown that real wages among Americans have fallen over the past decade as income has not kept pace with inflation. However…