by Brian Jeffiers

Created on: November 05, 2010

The same sentence drew both a period and a question mark.

The recession is over.

The recession is over?

Newspaper editors, starved for positive economic news, ran it high and wide.  Blogs and web sites lit up.  Twitter went a-twitter.  And of course, the TV pundits jumped in.  Soon a nationwide debate was born, with a stubborn insistence on the statement's accuracy to one side and incredulous scoffing on the other.  How were such disparate viewpoints sustained in a single economy?

The answer is not who's deluded and who's lucid.  What's being debated here is an issue of semantics, a battle of definitions waged on one side by economists, and on the other by those who would just call themselves "regular people". 

To the economists, strictly speaking, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth-shrinking gross domestic product.  That's it.  No rules about unemployment (in most schools of thought), inflation, interest rates, or any other indicator.  Just negative growth.  So in that strict economics definition, one single quarter of positive economic growth, no matter how meager, constitutes an end to the recession.  That threshold was reached, so historically speaking, the recession is indeed over.

Saying stuff like that gets economists in hot water, of course, because people are suffering every bit as acutely as before this mopey helium balloon drifted by, back when the glass wasn't even half full.  The jobs aren't back, the homeownership isn't back, and God knows the balanced budget isn't back.

Economists agree that it's still not the economy anyone wants to see.  And just because the continuity of the 2008 recession has ended doesn't mean it won't have a stunt double show its face for late 2010, nor does it guarantee that revised GDP figures won't later reverse the verdict for this phantom "good" quarter and lump us back into the 2008 streak. 

But to start getting better, it's got to stop getting worse.  You can't start going forward until you stop going backward, and in between those steps there is a moment when you aren't moving at all.  We are there now.  The feared double-dip recession could backtrack us into more pain, or some little spark might get things going again.

The economy might have stopped bleeding.  Now it must start recovering.  There is that hope.  Time will tell.

Learn more about this author, Brian Jeffiers.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.