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CNNMoney.com is carrying an article by Chris Isadore, "It's official: recession since '07" that verifies a recession has been going on since December of last year.
The article says that The National Bureau of Economic Research, an organization made up of a private group of leading economists, made the report. It is their job to identify the beginning and ending of recessions.This information confirms what many Americans thought was happening. The downturn of the labor market triggered the announcement by the NBER. Attached to the article is a list of recessions since November of 1948 and the length of time each lasted. The major cause says Isadore, is the housing market's failure to pull out of its doldrums. Why do Americans believe we are in a recession? Is it because they have experienced it or because it is what they have been told that they are? The fiasco with the financial institutions is not from an economic turndown. It emanates from incredible unchecked incompetency. The press said that deals for Christmas wouldn't end after Black Friday. In fact it would signal the beginning of a continuous drop in prices. I even wrote an article with that data on Associated Content. Not allowing for that fact, articles written after Black Friday said shopping results were "mixed" depending on the product, and, reporters wrung their collective hands saying that there was no urgency to this year's shopping, but there was! See the reports posted at the end of this article. Of course a Wal-Mart employee was killed by shoppers in a stampede. Unfortunately that says more about the human condition than the economy. But the news overall is that shopping was brisk and in fact up over last year. The press continued to report untrue information.
I wrote in another article that the newspaper in my hometown ran a headline the day after Black Friday that read "Mall Mania." Our stores are very busy. When the stock market was going up and down, the press would write articles that would say "Stock Market Dives" with a subtitle in small print "recovers by close." Am I disagreeing with the NBER and saying there is no recession? No. I am not saying that. I think there is. What I am saying is that this report doesn't carry the validity with me it might have had we been getting solid information all along. I find it hard to believe things are extremely bad when I see how the press is playing the game.