One of the biggest accomplishments of the president, in his own words, is managing to push the official (U-3) unemployment rate, from its post-Lehman high of 10% hit in October 2009 to only 6.6% as of January 2014, as Friday's jobs report revealed. This rapid drop in unemployment - call it the "Obama Recovery" - caught none other than the Fed completely unaware, whose 6.5% unemployment rate tightening threshold is now in tatters, as it the credibility of the Fed's forward guidance as the Fed will have no choice but to scrap all unemployment QE ending, rate hiking "thresholds" at its next FOMC meeting.

So what happened to the unemployment rate that it dropped so fast that it surprised and embarrassed even the "venerable" Federal Reserve (which had initially expected a 6.5% unemployment rate some time in 2015)? To get the answer we go back in time to the last (and only previous) time when the US unemployment rate dropped from roughly 10%, which was in June 1983, to 6.6%, which took place three and half years later, in December 1986 - let's call it the "Reagan Recovery" in short.

Here is how the old normal compares to the "New Normal."

US unemployment dropped from 10.1% to 6.6% between June 1983 and December 1986: an interval of 43 months.

US unemployment dropped from 10.0% to 6.6% between October 2009 and January 2014: an interval of 52 months.

So far so good: one can expect the "Obama Recovery" from the Great Financial Crisis to take a little bit longer than "Reagan's."

But what about the internals. This is where things start getting weird.

First, we look at the number of actual jobs added (according to the Establishment survey) from the 10% point at the peak to the 6.6% at the bottom. What we find is that despite the US workforce being over 30% larger today than it was 28 years ago, it took far less actual jobs created to drop the unemployment rate by 3.4%. Specifically, while the "Reagan Recovery" resulted in the creation of 10.5 million jobs, the "Obama Recovery" achieved the same low unemployment rate with only 7.5 million jobs added.