Official: Recession Started in December 2007

I suppose this is no news to anyone who has any contact with the real world, but the NBER, the body charged with deciding these matters, has now made the official pronouncement: the US went into recession in December 2007. Here’s the news from the Wall Street Journal: NBER Makes It Official: Recession Started in December 2007

Let’s not mock too much! Getting the data in order to make this pronouncement takes time and is subject to many revisions. And to an extent this ‘official’ news is more relevant to historians than policy makers, so it’s tardiness is unimportant.

Nonetheless, the fact that we are in recession is significant for all of us who are worried about the implied underutilization of resources that is one of the defining properties of recession. Getting those resources back to work at full capacity is the number one objective of policy makers at the moment.

That’s what the stimulus package Obama is looking for is supposed to do. Let’s hope he gets his way quickly.