If I remember correctly, a recession did happen. It used to be defined as two quarters of negative GDP growth back to back, but yellen simply changed that definition.
The NBER seems to have no fixed criteria for what a recession is. Not sure how reliably that reflects the economic reality of the majority of people then. Obviously criteria need to be adjusted over time, given changes in how economies work and what they even consist of.
Good thing I’m not an economist, because it sure feels like lower and middle class income households are being fleeced and destroyed with inflation and increased profit margins disguised as being part of inflation. I’d call the current economic situation a recession, but it isn’t up to me after all.
I am an inflationary economist, and while BLS is working on income quintile inflation rates (and I think they’re awesome and should be fully funded by Congress and published - but I digress), I don’t know of any similar analysis for like…income quintile recession analysis. You’d be better off looking at the individual factors like unemployment and employment by quintile, inflation, and maybe income inequality measures. Recessions are defined after the fact and mostly for whole economy analysis, and like any higher level measure, often are very wrong when looking at an individual, but very correct in the aggregate.
It was never defined as that. That’s been a colloquial marker for one but never a real definition.
And Yellen doesn’t have anything to do with defining a recession either. The NBER (national bureau of economic research) is the authority that declares recessions, and they only ever do it retroactively
The Covid 19 recession was declared despite only lasting 2 months.
If I remember correctly, a recession did happen. It used to be defined as two quarters of negative GDP growth back to back, but yellen simply changed that definition.
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Okay, then someone should update the Wikipedia article, because that still says that it’s two quarters with a 1,5% decline
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The NBER seems to have no fixed criteria for what a recession is. Not sure how reliably that reflects the economic reality of the majority of people then. Obviously criteria need to be adjusted over time, given changes in how economies work and what they even consist of.
Good thing I’m not an economist, because it sure feels like lower and middle class income households are being fleeced and destroyed with inflation and increased profit margins disguised as being part of inflation. I’d call the current economic situation a recession, but it isn’t up to me after all.
Removed by mod
I am an inflationary economist, and while BLS is working on income quintile inflation rates (and I think they’re awesome and should be fully funded by Congress and published - but I digress), I don’t know of any similar analysis for like…income quintile recession analysis. You’d be better off looking at the individual factors like unemployment and employment by quintile, inflation, and maybe income inequality measures. Recessions are defined after the fact and mostly for whole economy analysis, and like any higher level measure, often are very wrong when looking at an individual, but very correct in the aggregate.
Shrug Statistics.
Besides what others have mentioned, there was no drop in gdp.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1aimT
It was never defined as that. That’s been a colloquial marker for one but never a real definition.
And Yellen doesn’t have anything to do with defining a recession either. The NBER (national bureau of economic research) is the authority that declares recessions, and they only ever do it retroactively
The Covid 19 recession was declared despite only lasting 2 months.