There can still be a recession while GDP is positive, too. The NBER doesn’t look only at GDP, and in fact they place much more emphasis on two monthly indicators:
1. Personal income LESS transfer payments (ie, government aid as personal income isn’t a “non-recession” indication...
2. Employment.
This is the reason why the NBER declared the recession to start in Dec 2007 — you could see since August of 2007 that personal income started dropping off rather markedly, and unemployment started kicking up. The first wave of the debt panic in September 2007 kicked up unemployment another notch.
Unemployment is still going up; personal income was up only slightly in July. If this was the end of the recession (per NBER methodology), we won’t hear anything out of the NBER much before January or February 2010.
Thanks for the good analysis.