[sneeze-slayer]

The US is officially in a recession when the National Bureau of Economic Research says we are. Two quarters of shrinking GDP is often used as a heuristic but other factors like duration and intensity are included as well. Sometimes labor and unemployment data gets corrected months later, so it is sometimes the case that a recession is not official until it has already passed.

Basically, in the US, we are in a recession when the Business Cycle Dating Committee says so.

https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating

[brainphreeze]

We're not "officially" in a recession because the midterms are just around the corner. The numbers they use to judge inflation, GDP, recession are all fudged for political purposes. I don't need some greased politician or partisan body to tell me that.

This would be the same regardless of which party were in power, the government lies.

[Victerius]

Show your evidence that the official consumer price index and gross domestic product are wrong.

[peyton]

That’s a private think tank. Nothing in that link claims to be any sort of official definition. I cannot tell if your comment is sarcasm.

[insightcheck]

The White House's official position is that the NBER's definition is the official one. From their website [1]:

"What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.

"[...] The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—the official recession scorekeeper—defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”"

You can certainly make the argument that people shouldn't use this definition or that better measures exist, but it's objectively the official definition used by the US federal government.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/21/...

[nostromo]

Ah yes, the self-appointed, private, and secretive cabal of folks that decided they would be arbiters of truth, NBER.

Here's the thing -- there is no "official" or "legal" definition of recession in the United States. Yes, you'll hear regulators and politicians defer to NBER, but that's it.

The most common definition used by economists and the financial industry is the same one used world-wide: two quarters of negative growth. And by that measure we're in a recession.