Posted by
Defend America on Friday, October 30, 2009 10:38:31 AM
The Recoveryless Recovery
By Randall Hoven
The recession is over, supposedly. The preliminary estimate of the 3rd quarter's Gross Domestic Product was announced Thursday, and it showed the economy growing at an annual rate of 3.5% from July through September, after four consecutive quarters of decline.
As the Associated Press reported,
waiting for the official call from the National Bureau of Economic
Research -- specifically, its Business Cycle Dating Committee -- is all
but a formality. That's funny; GDP growth was not used as the measure
for timing the beginning of this recession. So why would it be used to time its end?
GDP last peaked in the 2nd
quarter of 2008. Yet the NBER said the recession started in December
2007, six months earlier. In fact, the NBER declared the recession
before we'd even had two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the
standard rule-of-thumb for calling a recession.