Gadol, appealing to “gold standard” NBER is a political trick: the estimate will come up in a year, denying us a real-time signal to change economics and – o, horror – politics via elections. We need early signals. Let’s see how recession is defined:
Oxford dictionary: a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.
investopedia: Because recessions often last six months or more, one popular rule of thumb is that two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) constitute a recession.
wiki: Though there is no global consensus on the definition of a recession, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of a recession.[3][4][5] In the United States, a recession is defined as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales”.[6] In the United Kingdom and other countries, it is defined as a negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters
In a 1974 The New York Times article, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Julius Shiskin suggested that a rough translation of the bureau’s qualitative definition of a recession into a quantitative one that almost anyone can use might run like this:
In terms of duration—declines in real gross national product (GNP) for two consecutive quarters; a decline in industrial production over a six‐month period.
In terms of depth—A 1.5 per cent decline in real GNP; a 15 per cent decline non-agricultural employment; a two‐point rise in unemployment to a level of at least 6 percent.
In terms of diffusion—A decline in non-agricultural employment in more than 75 per cent of industries, as measured over six‐month spans, for six months or longer