Call It Whatever You Want, The Economy Sucks

[Valin]

The Fedealist

No ‘recession?’ Ok, how about we call it ‘stagflation?’

David Harsanyi

July 27 2022

Earlier this week, I wrote about the ginned-up controversy over the true meaning of “recession.” Second-quarter GDP estimates are coming on Friday, and the Biden administration fears it will show two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, the traditional definition of a “recession.”

Today, the compliant press did its thing. Paul Krugman, who not long ago was predicting a Biden Boom, asks, “Recession: What Does It Mean?” Two negative quarters of GDP growth are not, argues the columnist, “how recessions are defined; more important, it’s not how they should be defined.” Perhaps that’s true. One would take Krugman’s assertions more seriously, however, if he could point to a single instance in which two quarters of GDP contraction were not defined by the economists or the media — or him — as a “recession.”

“Getting people to understand that and the nuances of our strange, vexing, economic moment is just really hard,” explains Politico’s Ben White. Things always get exceptionally opaque and weird when Democrats face bad economic news. Everything becomes just incredibly complicated.

“By one common definition — the economy shrinking for consecutive quarters — the U.S. economy is on the cusp of a recession,” writes the Associated Press. “Yet that definition isn’t the one that counts.” It was the one that counted in February of 2020, the first quarter the GDP contracted, during the short Covid recession, an inorganic economic event instigated by government policies. There was no debate over the complex number crunching needed for the official designation of the National Bureau of Economic Research.  

(Snip)

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Lets go back to 1978

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