NBER Finally Admits U.S. in Recession

The agency charged with officially dating recessions in the U.S. finally came out and said that the U.S. officially entered the recent recession in December 2007. That means we are roughly 1 year into the current recession.

I have no idea what took them so long to come to this conclusion, but better late than never I guess.

Here are the comments from their press release:

• The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met by conference call on Friday, November 28. The committee maintains a chronology of the beginning and ending dates (months and quarters) of U.S. recessions.
• The committee determined that a peak in economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in December 2007.
• The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in November 2001 and the beginning of a recession. The expansion lasted 73 months; the previous expansion of the 1990s lasted 120 months.
• A recession is 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. A recession begins when the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion.
• Because a recession is a broad contraction of the economy, not confined to one sector, the committee emphasizes economy-wide measures of economic activity.
• The committee identified December 2007 as the peak month, after determining that the subsequent decline in economic activity was large enough to qualify as a recession. Payroll employment, the number of filled jobs in the economy based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' large survey of employers, reached a peak in December 2007 and has declined in every month since then.