Recession Now

When the good times never stay
And the cheap thrills always seem to fade away
When will we fall
When will we fall down?
--Toad the Wet Sprocket

The traditional definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth. This has now occurred based on Q1 and Q2 GDP prints.

As these pages have discussed, political partisans are trying to manage the narrative away from the traditional definition--claiming that recessions only officially occur once they are declared by the 'experts' at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Conveniently, such a declaration would occur sometime after the midterm elections in November.

What the partisan narrative managers fail to note is that two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth have always coincides with NBER's formal declaration of recession.