It's official: Recession since Dec. '07 Options

[dauss]

Might as well have announced that water is wet, because it's pretty obvious. However, something does irk me.
People believe that a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP, and it's probably because other countries go by that measure, but it has never defined a recession in the US. The National Bureau of Economic Research does it for the US and they look at five different factors(not in any particular order).
1. Real GDP, with the inflation component
2. Employment(non farm payrolls)
3. Wholesale-Retail Sales
4. Real Income
5. Industrial Production

It was known months ago that 4/5 of the above were in deep recession since December 2007.

The problem with the NEBR is that they never accounce these things until months afterwards. The last two recessions, 1990-1991 and 2001.

On April 25, 1991, the NBER announced that a recession started in July of 1990. It later announced at the end of 1992 that the recession actually ended in March 1991. It was an 8 month recession, and it took the NBER 9 months to make the official determination.

And for the last recession that lasted from March to November 2001, the NBER announced on November 26, 2001 that a recession started in March, just about the time that the recession was ending. In July 2003, the NBER made the official announcement that the recession ended in November 2001. It was an 8 month recession, and it took exactly 8 months for the NBER to make the official recession announcement.

Based on their track record of the previous 2 recessions, they were over around the time they officially announced it.

Today they waited nearly a year before the official announcement. The realization of the subprime crisis came in August 2007. Here we are now, 16 months and counting with no end in sight.