In his CBS Moneywatch column, Mark Thoma writes that while things may be looking up a bit, it does not seem that real economic recovery is happening anytime soon.  He points to these graphs to remind us where we stand:

Thoma:

The problem we face is that the sectors that generally lead us out of a recession are the sectors that were most damaged from the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent recession. Housing construction is unlikely to increase anytime soon, and households are still struggling to pay off their debt, debt that was made worse by the unemployment, stock crash, and housing price crash that came with the recession. (The automobile sector is also important in recoveries, but the signs there aren't any better.)

Recessions have different causes, and some types of recessions are easier to recover from than others. An increase in oil prices or an interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve can be reversed quickly, and the recovery time is generally relatively fast. But as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff explain in their book This Time is Different, recessions that are caused by financial collapses are among the most difficult to recover from. When this type of a recession hits an economy, lost decades are not at all unusual.

Unfortunately for us, both housing markets and household balance sheets were severely damaged by the recession, and repairing them will take time. Housing values remain depressed with no sign of a robust recovery in sight, and households continue with the debt deleveraging process. Neither sector seems poised to lift us out of the doldrums in the near future.

Read Will the economy turn around in 2012? here.