Arbitrary as in what's been in textbooks for maybe the last 30 years (at least what I know of)?
Arbitrary as in what everyone with any schooling in macro economics from pretty much any school understands that term to mean?
You know, my two year old speaks his own language too, no one can understand him, but it sound cute. Maybe you can come over and have a conversation with him?
Well Red, I actually have 2 degrees (Finance and Economics) and, the fact is, the “2 consecutive quarters” definition is, in fact, arbitrary.
A recession is a sustained economic slowdown which is, in fact, happening.
Just because your firm and/or industry is not feeling the pain does not mean the economy overall is not declining.
And anyone with any knowledge of how the government compiles the data used in their reports can tell you it is not reflective of economic activity as a whole, and hasn’t been for some time, which is why the Fed regularly takes actions which would be contraindicated by the reports. Simply, they have raw data which, as it is unfiltered by the formulas established by politically motivated employees of the Department of Commerce.