The slow but steady recovery from the Great Recession just hit a milestone: It's tied for the second-longest economic expansion in American history.
The recession ended in June 2009, which means the recovery is 106 months old through April of this year. That matches the expansion from 1961 to 1969, an era of big government spending under President John F. Kennedy and then President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
Unlike the breathtaking growth of the 1960s, the current expansion won't set any records for speed. It took far longer than many hoped for unemployment to get back to healthy levels. Wages have only recently begun to accelerate meaningfully.
Yet the very fact that the economy didn't roar back to life from the financial crisis extended the life of the recovery. The slow speed prevented it from overheating.
"The silver lining is this very long economic expansion," said Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. "We didn't experience the same boom-to-bust cycle that we had in the past."