At one point during his lecture, he noted that the published level of unemployment--9.7 percent of the workforce--is actually an understatement of the true figure. When you add in underemployed workers (people who want to be full-time workers but are only part time) and discouraged workers (those who just stopped looking), the unemployment rate balloons to 17 percent of the overall workforce, Mr. Hartwig revealed.

He also said that unemployment rates typically continue to rise six-to-nine months after recessions end.

"This has real impacts on workers' compensation exposure," he said, highlighting just one property and casualty insurance line where premium growth is being sliced by economic factors.

"We do not catapult out of recessions typically," he said, also presenting some information on home building and new business starts, which directly impact excess and surplus lines carriers with books of business in the construction trades or focused on insurance for new ventures. New business starts "plunged" to the lowest level since 1995 in fourth-quarter 2008, and "we're waiting for that to come back [up] now," he said.

Delivering good news amidst the sobering statistics, Mr. Hartwig began his presentation with some indicators that indeed support the idea that the recession "technically" ended in June.

That would mean that the recession was 19 months long, Mr. Hartwig said

At this meeting last year, "we were in the eye of the [economic] storm," he said, noting that gross domestic product was shrinking at 5.5 percent annual rate.

Reviewing the GDP figures for this year, he said that after a discouraging start--6.5 percent shrinkage in the first quarter--the figure is now down to minus-0.7 percent for second-quarter 2009, and it's like to reverse direction--so that the GDP will grow in the third quarter, he said.

Recoveries last a long time--six-to-eight years, Mr. Hartwig added.

Focusing on near-term implications, Mr. Hartwig said, "The reality is we don't have one economy, we have 50 economies."

While some parts of the country won't start recovering for a year, "there's a swath of the United States from Texas up to the Mountain states and through the Great Plains" that is doing relatively well, he said. The states that have stronger economies now are agriculture-intensive, energy-intensive, and natural resource-intensive states, he said

Using job growth as a measure of recovery, Mr. Hartwig pointed to North Dakota as the state with the lowest unemployment rate, followed by Wyoming and South Dakota.

On the other hand, heavy industrial states like Ohio, Michigan and Indiana continue to do poorly, he said. Also states like Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were hit hardest by the burst of "the real estate bubble," are also laggards in terms of economic recovery, he said.

Mr. Hartwig also identified 11 employment sectors that he believes have the best growth potential over the next 10 years:

He mentioned government, education, health care, traditional energy, alternative energy, agriculture, natural resources, environmental, technology, light manufacturing and export-oriented industries.

Seek business with firms that have government contracts, he advised his audience. Regarding export industries, he said, "Several of these are plays on the long-term weak dollar."