Hate to Say, "I Told You So"

Add, "We are not in a recession" to the nonsense from the right. Put it in the same bucket as "global warming is a myth," "Obama is a Marxist/terrorist," "Evolution is false," "Fox News is fair and balanced," and "the world is flat." I listen & read to a lot of news and it has been amusing to hear all these "experts" shout that we are not in a recession for the last year.

We don't know we are "in a recession" until the the NBER (see below) tell us we are, and guess what? We have been in recession for the last twelve months!!! If I knew this, why didn't so many economists know it?

Excerpts from the BBC:

US recession 'began last year'

Machinary" border="0" height="170" hspace="0" vspace="0" width="226"> US manufacturing has now contracted for four months in a row

The US entered a recession in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Its business cycle dating committee, which is considered the arbiter of whether the US is in recession, met on Friday to make the decision.

The NBER says that the US economic expansion lasted 73 months, from November 2001, before contracting.

It used a broad range of economic indicators, such as employment and production, to make this judgement.

In a statement, the committee said that the "decline in economic activity in 2008 met the standard for a recession".

It said that employment peaked in December 2007 and has been falling every since.

And it said that personal income all began falling in the first quarter of 2008, while industrial production peaked in January 2008.

The NBER uses key monthly indicators of economic output, including employment, industrial production, real personal income, and wholesale and retail sales - to determine when economic growth has turned negative, rather than relying solely on two quarterly declines in GDP.

It defines a recession as a "significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income and other indicators."

Although a private sector body, the NBER has been dating the business cycle since 1929.

It does not forecast the length of the recession.