second quarter. Of course, we just had those decent retail sales numbers. People will be surprised to know that the recession call does not come down to GDP. GDP more often than not tends to decline during a recession, but the final arbiters of the recession call or the expansion call is the National Bureau of Economic Research. And I say this with a tip of the hat to Martin Feldstein, who headed that organization for many years, who passed away last week. But there's four basic tenets to the cycle. And guess what? GDP is not one of them. People seem to think that back to back quarters of negative GDP defines a recession. Actually not true. That's a Wall Street colloquial. You'll find plenty of recessions where there are not back to back quarters of negative GDP. It just so happens that GDP is soft, but it is even after decline. If you go back to 2001, where we actually had a recession from March to November of that year, you'd say, where was the recession looking at GDP? Four basic (10/57)
You are viewing a single comment's thread from: