The NBER committee that sets official dates for recessions typically does not act for many months after a downturn has begun. The panel is looking for clear evidence of a substantial, lasting contraction. "The committee waits long enough so that the existence of a recession is not at all in doubt," according to the NBER Web site. "It waits until it can assign an accurate date."I can understand that. Waiting a few months seems logical, so as not to cause panic. But, it's been a year since the recession began, according to their report. Rather than avoiding panic, it's just made people angry and made themselves look like fools.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Well... It was the Thought That Counted
Today it was announced that the United States economy is in fact in a recession and has been since December 2007, according to this article at MSNBC ("It's Official: U.S. is in Recession"). I don't know about the rest of you, but, I kinda figured that out sometime in late winter/early spring of this year (admittedly, I wasn't sure of the exact date we entered a recession, but that's what the officials at the National Bureau for Economic Research are for!). Wasn't it only a few months we were told a recession "was possible?" Now we're in the middle of a full-blown worldwide economic crisis. To top it all off, the White House didn't even use the word "recession" when they commented on the recession! Okay, so, I probably overreacted a bit just then. But, what does this newly-gained knowledge do for us? Will it help us recover from the recession? Probably not. Instead of wasting money looking at when we got into this mess, let's look at how we got into this mess and how we can get ourselves out of it! The article tries to explain why the announcement comes so late:
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7 comments:
I cannot believe that these people new we were facing crisis so early on. Now,that we are facing disasters they want to tell us the exact date. Like you stated Nick lets focus on how to make it better.
At least we can always count on our government to state the obvious.
My best guess is that the Government wanted the recession to go away. The media has been shouting recession since very near then, and my bet is that the Government wanted as much consumer confidence as possible. On October 12, 2007 the DOW Jones Industrial Average was it 14093, also know as its highest value, ever, by the end of the year the DJI was at 13264 not a considerable loss, and yes I know that that there are other ways of measure the wealth of the united sates can be measured in other ways The DOW is just a very convenient and surprisingly accurate way of doing it. For example we are currently in a recession, and the DOW has plummeted. I don’t happen to have time to walk down Main Street and see how every one is doing; I also have a strange assumption that the retirement funds, for example, are going to act very much like the DOW Jones. While it is easy so say you should have told us then, it didn’t seem like it was going to be a major problem then. It also might have made no difference, aside from destroying consumer confidence, to announce the eminent demise of the U.S. economy. People don’t general come together to try and get the economic wheels unstuck when they hear that there is a problem.
yeah, I feel like we've been in a recession for a lot longer than just a year. I mea, come on the economy has been going downhill for much longer than that, and what are the guidelines for officially determining a recession? and personally, I think its ridiculous to, at this point, just be naming the economic situation as a recession. they should have named it earlier so people could have really starte preparing.
News broke today that Ford is now about to go under if Congress doesn't bail them out. It seems like every big company is going down, and I can only hope Obama and his experts hatch a way to fix this mess.
Oliver raises an important point when saying that Ford is now about to go under. The recession has become a deep and serious issue that one of the major companies is about to fail. Obama does need to fix this problem, I strongly believe that he will.
Leave it to the government to be Johny-on-the-spot there. Well, now that we've established that we are indeed in a recession (oh, but that is such a harsh word, though...), we should now focus on what to do about it. I completely agree with the assessment that the government just wasted valuable time and energy debating over the establishment of a timeframe for all of this when it could have been used more appropriately to devise a way to hunker down and regroup. And Oliver, would you perhaps happen to have an article that indicates such economic news relating to Ford's status? I'm not doubting what you said, I would just like to know, because such an issue actually affects my family significantly. We are all affected by this current economic instability, some more or less than others. These are difficult times... I sincerely hope it gets better. I'm not sure what will happen otherwise.
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