Their defintion of what a recession is differs from the OFFICIAL and ACCEPTED definition.
The only thing NBER has in common with anything Conservatives know about is Paul W. McCracken who is also a trustee of American Enterprise Institute or (AEI).
I'm still turning over in my mind whether AEI should be considered Conservative or RINO. After all, they, themselves tout "The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post publish more op-eds by AEI scholars than by scholars from all of the other D.C.-based think tanks combined."
Getting your stuff published in the anti-semitic Washington Post doesn't mean all that much anymore, and the NYT? Give me a break.
So, who should we believe, AEI, or this other group, or the NYT, or the Washington Post, or our own eyes ~ the definition of a recession is that you gotta' have two quarters of decline, not just one, and December 2007 doesn't cut it in that calculation.
This is semantics...there is more than one indicator that shows recession...the recession began in 2007. The car industry is the first to take a hit and the last to recover...no question things began going South in 2007.
Yep, you can use that definition, which means we are in a recession. The world's largest economy contracted at an annualised rate of 3.8pc in the three months to December, better than the 5.5pc drop forecast by economists, but bad enough to make it the biggest contraction since the first quarter of 1982. The data confirms that the US is in a recession – typically defined as two successive quarters of negative GDP growth – after declining by 0.5pc in the third quarter.