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Yet more defintions of “recession” if you haven’t found one that suits you yet. Dave Ramsey sticks to the text book defintion.

Dave has been taking a lot of slack of late for saying that we are not in a recession, which is technically defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.  I blogged recently about how many in the media and even the government, feel like we are in a recession in all but name and said the old definition no longer fits.

This article at CNNMoney.com makes a couple of interesting points.

in the United States, an official declaration of a recession is made - often after a recovery has already begun - by a committee from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private organization.

This implies that we are often flat in the middle of a recession before we know it.  Dave does not deny that we could be in the front end of a recession, but it irks people to know end that he sticks to the technical defintion.

It seems that two consecutive quarters of negative growth is not the ONLY definition used by the National Bureau of Economic Research either.  This sounds like the government getting sophisticated.  I.E. - Watch Out.

 It defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity” over a period of a several months, and takes into account the depth of the decline, not just the duration, according to the NBER’s Web site. It also uses a broad array of indicators in addition to the GDP, it says.

CNN then drops in a little Chicken Little for us at the end.

The United States has not been in recession since 2001, but many economists expect a recession this year. Some economists have said the United States is already experiencing one, and surveys suggest much of the public agrees.