[antoko]

Recession is never a relative term, it has a specific meaning, 2 or more consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as measured by real GDP.

Hmm apparently I'm not nearly on as solid ground as I thought with regard to this. I've been in the States for 11 years and apparently still have a UK/Euro bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#Definition

In the United States, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is generally seen as the authority for dating US recessions. The NBER defines an economic recession as: "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[5] Almost universally, academics, economists, policy makers, and businesses defer to the determination by the NBER for the precise dating of a recession's onset and end.

In the United Kingdom, recessions are generally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, as measured by the seasonal adjusted quarter-on-quarter figures for real GDP.[6][7] The exact same recession definition apply for all member states of the European Union.