Recession Began Last December, Economists Say

The United States economy officially sank into a recession last December, which means that the downturn is already longer than the average for all recessions since World War II, according to the committee of economists responsible for dating the nation’s business cycles. In declaring that the economy has been in a downturn for almost 12 months, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed what many Americans had already been feeling in their bones. But private forecasters warned that this downturn was likely to set a new postwar record for length and likely to be more painful than any recession since 1980 and 1981. “We will rewrite the record book on length for this recession,” said Allen Sinai, president of Decision Economics in Lexington, Mass. “It’s still arguable whether it will set a new record on depth. I hope not, but we don’t know.” Read the rest of the New York Times article