Dude, where’s my recession?

ALMOST a year has passed since the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which estimates gross domestic product (GDP), announced that real GDP had declined over the previous two quarters – a phenomenon that is widely, although incorrectly, described as the official definition of a recession.

Right-wingers had a field day, crowing about the “Biden recession”. But it wasn’t just a partisan thing. Even forecasters who knew that recessions are defined by multiple indicators, and that America wasn’t in a recession yet, began predicting one in the near future.

As Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, one of the few prominent recession sceptics, put it: “Every person on TV says recession. Every economist says recession. I’ve never seen anything like it.”