It's funny when you read so many people on HN talk about others speaking outside of their areas of expertise when someone is talking about tech and then come to articles like this where a bunch of programmers try to sound like experts on the economy. Hubris is not in short supply.
* China is still purusing zero COVID.
* There's a land war in Europe with Russia effectively cut off from the Western world.
* German manufacturing, once a workhorse, is being crushed by energy costs
* much of the developing world is swimming hard against the current just to stay alive.
I don't think we are in a situation analogous to 1947, of course, and I do think we are in or at least heading into a more-than-technical recession. But "irrelevant because that only happens after once in a lifetime extremely disruptive events" is a pretty... odd... take in 2022.
And—relatedly—a once-in-ever declaration of a recession of less than one quarter, because of how uniquely sharp the decline in output, employment, and all the recession-relevant measures was, even though it quickly reversed direction due to stimulus and other policy responses.
So it's kind of weird people today pretending that the 2-consecutive-doen-quarter thing has always been an ironclad definition of a recession.
Hmm, maybe Germany can solve this the same way they "solved" ballooning Berliner rents: just pass a law saying how much energy should cost. Simple. They do love regulations over there.
Or just ask Gerhard Schröder and the rest of their former chancellors who were in bed with Russia, to blow their hot air through the pipes this winter. They have enough of it.
The comment you replied to gave evidence that directly contradicts the OP comment.
This Twitter thread has details:
https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/1552411779040419841
The comparison between an economy transitioning from war footing and one transitioning from pandemic footing might be relevant.
So? The NBER business cycle dating work covers back into the 19th century, even if some of it was done retrospectively. If anything, the fact that it applied it's methodology this way to times when there could not possibly have been any policy impact to its decisions just further undermines the idea that exceptions to the 2-consecutive-down-quarter rule are about current political convenience.
> And 1947 marked the first year the US produced a quarterly GDP report.
NBER was doing income and product reports before the government did, the government actually directly was motivated by NBER’s prior work in starting to do them.
This is something that everyone who is actually interested in the topic will have heard of because it's been mentioned repeatedly by the experts. And yet this thread is filled with confident statements by people who clearly have put zero effort into forming their opinion. Sad.