Bloomberg Poll: Only 1 In 7 Americans Believes A Lasting Economic Recovery Has Taken Hold

According to a Bloomberg National Poll, only one in seven Americans believe that a lasting economic recovery has taken hold.

The bad news doesn't stop there. Nearly half of respondents say that the U.S. is in a “‘fragile' rebound and could fall back into recession.” Meanwhile, more than one-third of respondents feel that the United States has yet to emerge from the recession.

Want some more bad news? According to the poll, 63 percent of Americans think the nation is on the wrong track – down only three percent from when the question was posed in December. Bloomberg said that this decline was the “lowest in the national mood in the one and a half years the Bloomberg poll has been conducted.”

If this paints an accurate picture of America's economy, the nation might be far worse off than suggested by other economic data – including, Bloomberg notes, six quarters of economic growth, a 95 percent rise in the S&P 500 (over the past 24 months), and the reported addition of 192,000 jobs in February.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the “official” end date of the recession was June 2009.

But wait, there's more. Roughly half of poll respondents say that they are personally worse off than they were two years ago, back when the country was reportedly losing somewhere around 800,000 jobs per month. When you take a look at some of Bloomberg's other numbers (while 8.7 million U.S. jobs have been lost since January 2008, only 1.3 million have been regained), the respondents' views are not too surprising.

Robert Lockhart, an 85-year-old retiree in Luray, Virginia, is not very optimistic. “Most of our jobs are overseas,” he told Bloomberg. “They send the parts back here to put together. But your refrigerators, your TVs are produced overseas.”