NBER: U.S. In Recession That Began Last December

The Washington Post ^ | 2008-12-01 | Neil Irwin

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

Too true.

My biggest problem is raw frustration. You try to warn people to protect their life savings, and they are just blind to it, listening to the shiesters in the media, and following the markets all the way down.

You want to see people protect their money. The big boys already got their 9 figure bonuses on the backs of the little guy, and now the talking heads in cahoots with the same big boys are saying “stay in the market, best time to buy.” Then stocks get pumped up with cash from the little guy, while the big guys sell out on the fattened stocks.

I’m not ground down, just frustrated. You want to see people protect their life savings, but they just won’t open their eyes. I’m racked with frustration. People here know the media lies and has an agenda, but when it comes to the economy, they still believe that same duplicitous media machine, who serves the Wall Street cronies, the Goldman Sachs hacks. I don’t get it.

[Oklahoma]

A bunch of egg headed fools can congregate together, define terms however they like, and present themselves as authorities on economics and semantics but that doesn't mean I have to accept it.

We use words to communicate and when the term “recession” is thrown around to describe something less than hard times it is done for a reason. I would suggest certain individuals and groups have political, social, and legal reasons to exaggerate the economy of the past seven or eight years. Their use of words to describe events which are not accurate is Orwellian.

[Pelham]

Just so I can establish what you are saying- are you saying that the organization that has refereed recessions since the practice began in 1920 should defer to your opinion?

[Oklahoma]

I’m saying I don’t give a damn what they call it or what they think.

Let’s say some group (somewhere, representing whatever) declares “We are the official definers and we have decided the 1930’s were actually a time of prosperity.” Would their saying so make it so? I don’t even care if they are mandated by a branch of the government to make such proclamations.

The economy is cyclical. Always has been, always will be. I could predict a boom ahead but that doesn’t mean we are in it now. The same goes for last winter. It was easy to predict a recession in the near future but that didn’t mean we were in one then, regardless of what this bunch says now.