The Recession Is Over, Long Live The Recession

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 20, 7:19PM EDT · Published Sep 20, 11:03AM EDT

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The recession ended last June, according to those who decide–the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The economy has been in an expansion since then, at least so far as the NBER is willing to admit. The agency made it clear that the economy did not return to normal 15 months ago. It simply stopped contracting.

It is hard to argue with the assessment since the Committee makes the rules. It is also hard to argue that most Americans do not perceive the recession as having reached an end–a number of polls show citizens believe that it could last until next year. Certainly those who are unemployed or underemployed cannot be convinced of any economic improvement. It is cold comfort that the non-farm part of the job pool is shedding only a hundred thousand jobs a month and not more than half a million.

The list of the indexes the NBER uses to make its decision:

Macroeconomic Advisers monthly GDP (June)
The Stock-Watson index of monthly GDP (June)
Their index of monthly GDI (July)
An average of their two indexes of monthly GDP and GDI (June)
Real manufacturing and trade sales (June)
Index of Industrial Production (June)
Real personal income less transfers (October)
Aggregate hours of work in the total economy (October)
Payroll survey employment (December)
Household survey employment (December)

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.