NBER Says The Recession is Over | Business

Recession Deals, Going, Going, Gone (Source: AP)

Good news for everyone who has been out of work for months, facing foreclosure or generally struggling to make their bills: The recession is over. The bad news: It has been for a while. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the organization that officially designates when a recession starts and when a recession ends, announced today that the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009. Does that mean unemployment will drop anytime soon? Probably not. The weird thing about the NBER is that by its own admission it doesn’t wait until the job market turns around before it calls the end of the recession, from the NBER’s statement:

Second, in previous business cycles, aggregate hours and employment have frequently reached their troughs later than the NBER’s trough date. In particular, in 2001-03, the trough in payroll employment occurred 21 months after the NBER trough date. In 2009, the NBER trough date is 6 months before the trough in payroll employment. In both the 2001-03 and 2009 cycles, household employment also reached its trough later than the NBER trough date.

So what did we learn from today’s “End of Recession” announcement?

Even if it feels like they called it early, the NBER, at least by feel, seems to have gotten one thing right. This recession was/is/will be longer than any in the post WWII period. By the NBER’s calculations, this recession lasted 18 months. That was two months longer than both the recessions in the mid-1970s and the one that started in July 1981.

For some the question is how long will it be until the NBER announces we are back in a recession. The last two times we have had double dips, the recession started 36 months later in the mid-1970s, and 12 months later in the early 1980s. The good news is that both of those times the earlier dip was a short one. So it could be that the length of this recession means that we will escape without a second leg. Let’s hope for the best.

Facebook, Wall Street Banks Sued Over Pre-IPO Financial Forecasts

Just days after its controversial IPO, Facebook and its Wall Street bankers have been hit by shareholder lawsuits alleging that the social networking giant and its underwriters concealed the company’s decelerating revenue growth from investors. The lawsuits come amid a growing furor about whether Facebook’s banks selectively disclosed information that gave favored clients an unfair advantage over other investors. Top U.S. regulators have begun examining the IPO, and now the U.S. Senate Banking Committee and other lawmakers want answers from Facebook about issues raised in the offering’s aftermath, according to The Hill newspaper.

Small Dairies Go Under as Milk Prices Sink Again

PLAINFIELD, Vt. — The MacLaren brothers are third-generation dairy farmers, but they will likely be the last in their family.

After working all their lives on the hillside farm in Vermont that their grandfather bought in 1939, rising to milk cows at 3 a.m., even in blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, they decided to call it quits, auctioning off their roughly 200 cows and equipment ranging from stalls and hoof trimmers to tractors and steel pails.

vbierschwale

Just another government group that produces volumes of reports that are inaccurate just like the Dept of Labor Unemployment reports.

shame, shame, shame.

Virgil
http://www.KeepAmericaAtWork.com
deconstructiva

Feh, some recovery. Many analysts and media types were late to the prom on calling the recession… while real people already knew when jobs melted away, stores at the mall started closing, and dubious mortgages began failing (as well as the derivatives based on them, but I digress) …so pardon my skepticism on this call, sorry.
gum0nshoe

Except, it is an independent group that is neutral and isn’t part of the government…
gum0nshoe

Eh, except a recession is based on continued losses in GDP and other economic indicators. With out that shrinking of the economy, there is no recession.
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What that means though is that things aren’t getting worse, not that they are getting better.
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It isn’t just “grow” or “shrink” measurements. You can maintain a status quo, not be in a recession, and not be in a true “recovery” or “upswing.” Basically what this means is that if there is more shrinkage it is a new recession and if it starts growing we start a new growth cycle. Kind of like the weather, you could have a day of deteriorating temperatures and then it might stop getting colder. That’s where we are now. It just stopped getting colder and so it can no longer be called a recession.
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Which is why the reception of this news is tepid at best.
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On another note, if you do look at private industry hires, they have been in the positive value range. Low positive numbers when compared with the amount of jobs lost, but positive all the same. Hopefully this is a sign of increasing momentum. If you ever took calculus or physics acceleration, or the slope of the derivative is now positive, so we can hope base on current trends for things to get better as time goes on, unless that acceleration variable drops.
tdhawk

Does it matter in real life whether these egg heads produce supposed data that in no way whatsoever resembles reality? Of course not. Not even a fool would strategically plan based on this tripe; however, maybe our government does!!!
http://senekaross.wordpress.com senekaross

We make a ladder for ourselves out of our vices when we trample them.

http://japan-russia.jimdo.com/

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