🚀 go-pugleaf

>>The Center for Business Cycle (?), the official arbiter of economic
>>trends, has declared that the latest US recession ended in March 1991,
>>and we have been in a recovery ever since.

Rick Wojick responds:

>For their next trick, they will show how people can be resurrected from the
>dead by defining life in just the right way.

That's not really fair.  This is really a reflection of the fact that the
official definition of "recession" has never been what the public thinks 
it is.  The definition is concerned with the _slope_ of a graph of GNP; a
recession begins when the graph falls (negative slope) for two consecutive
quarters and ends when the graph resumes climbing again, no matter how much
height was lost in the meantime.  The public's perception is more closely 
tied to the _height_ of the graph; times are not perceived to be better until
GNP has returned to roughly the level it had before the recession began, the 
lost ground made up.  That necessarily always occurs after the official end of
the recession.  In a slow recovery, like this one, quite a while after.