Re:What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
by dragonwriter on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @12:06AM
(#32327551)
> We are by the most common definition: two quarters of negative GDP growth.
That’s a common rule of thumb, but not the definition.
> Some folks in the US are weirdly insistent that recessions are defined by the NBER
These people include the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics [0] and the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis [1], among others. The US has used a tripartite definition where a recession has three required dimensions, “duration, depth, and diffusion”, for a long time; the 2-quarter-decline thing has long been cited as a guideline for the duration component, with separate rules of thumb sometimes cited for the other two. [2]
[1] https://www.bea.gov/help/glossary/recession – stating “The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private non-profit research organization that focuses on understanding the U.S. economy.”
That’s a common rule of thumb, but not the definition.
> Some folks in the US are weirdly insistent that recessions are defined by the NBER
These people include the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics [0] and the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis [1], among others. The US has used a tripartite definition where a recession has three required dimensions, “duration, depth, and diffusion”, for a long time; the 2-quarter-decline thing has long been cited as a guideline for the duration component, with separate rules of thumb sometimes cited for the other two. [2]
[0] https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2012/recession/pdf/recession_b... – stating “the National Bureau of Economic Research (the official arbiter of U.S. recessions)”
[1] https://www.bea.gov/help/glossary/recession – stating “The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private non-profit research organization that focuses on understanding the U.S. economy.”
[2] See this about the BLS criteria from 1974: https://web.archive.org/web/20200325140941/https://www.nytim...