Looks like someone forgot to lie.

(The Hill) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday that the labor market remains “quite weak,” despite a recent run of strong employment data that appears “out of sync” with some broader problems facing the economy.

Noting that the number of people working and the hours worked still linger well below pre-crisis levels, Bernanke described the current job market as “far from normal,” throwing some cold water on any nascent notion that the economy had fully recovered from the financial meltdown of 2008.

“Recent improvements are encouraging, but … in an absolute sense, the job market is still far from normal by many measures, and millions of families continue to suffer the day-to-day hardships associated with not being able to find suitable employment,” he said in a speech delivered to economists in Washington.

As the population grows, there are still 5 million fewer jobs in the U.S. economy than before the crisis. The unemployment rate is still three percentage points above the average over the last two decades, and many of the recent gains were thanks to reduced layoffs, not expanding business, which is not the recipe for sustainable improvement in the labor market, according to Bernanke.