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You'll get upvoted and I'll get downvoted because your political bias is the orthodoxy here, but the NBER has officially called a recession every single time we

You'll get upvoted and I'll get downvoted because your political bias is the orthodoxy here, but the NBER has officially called a recession every single time we had 2 consecutive quarters of negative growth. It's unreasonable to expect anything else in this case. If Trump was still president, the media would most definitely be calling this a recession. And they would be correct in doing so.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> the NBER has officially called a recession every single time we had 2 consecutive quarters of negative growth Because the other indicators they look at (employment, consumption etc.) have been consistent with recession in those cases. They've also called recessions without two consecutive down quarters (either with an up quarter in between, or most recently with a single down quarter), because the other indicators were strongly indicating recession. Right now jobs are up. Employment is strong, consumption is strong, the 1Q drop (not sure about 2Q because I haven't seeb details yet) was associated with a jump in imports as consumer purchases of imported goods shot up. Honestly, there's probably a problem with the entire concept of “recession” as a binary label, but the same multidimensional set of factors that has allowed multiple recessions to be determined without two consecutive down quarters supports non-recession with two consecutive down quarters.