ANN ARBOR – The Great Recession may have technically ended with gross domestic product growing again, but consumer attitudes and expectations remain at such historically low levels that the current economic situation still resembles a recession, one of the nation’s leading experts on consumer economic sentiment said Thursday.

Unlike the 1990-91 and 2001 recessions, the 2008-09 recession, known as the Great Recession, changed consumer spending patterns and has smashed confidence to the point that it will hold down GDP growth, said Richard Curtin, a University of Michigan Economics professor and director of the Reuters/U-M Surveys of Consumers at the U-M Institute for Social Research.

“The Great Recession is not over,” he told an audience of economists and officials at the U-M Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics. “We’re not out of this woods yet, and it’s going to be a long time before we get out of it.”

Curtin said it is how the recession hammered virtually everyone’s finances that has put consumers in a retrenching position. They want to know when unemployment will fall below 5 percent, when robust personal income growth will return and when the values of their pensions and homes will be restored, he said.

And in something of a dichotomy, consumers are more optimistic about the economy as a whole than their own personal financial situation, Curtin said. The vast majority of respondents in U-M’s surveys of consumers report they are still worse off than the previous year.

Consumer sentiment has barely changed in two years, comparable to the 1974-75 and 1981-82 recessions, Curtin said.

For 23 consecutive months, a majority of households have said they expect no improvement in their personal finances, a staggering streak.

“We haven’t seen a bit of improvement in that series, not a bit,” he said.

Just 23 percent in November said they expect their personal financial situation to improve, near the record low of 20 percent in the early 1980s. And there’s a steep decline in faith that President Barack Obama’s policies will help.

“It’s not that consumers do not expect the economy to improve in the year ahead,” Curtin said. “But they expect that improvement to be so slow that it will not immediately affect their own financial situation.”

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