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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (30029)	12/3/2008 2:53:04 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

That is exactly* the reason that most everyone has regarded their word as the 'official' word for decades now* Before just about now, recession calls by the media have almost always relied on the official stats. They may have called the recession before the 2nd quarter of negative growth was in the books, but that was based on anticipating the next quarter would be negative. As for trusting a government bureaucracy - I think the government organization has been pretty honest about negative GDP growth, if it is, well those stats are what officially determines a recession, it would be obviously false if two or more quarters of negative GDP growth where recorded but the government was saying "there is no recession". If the GDP stats aren't reasonably honest, well they, and some other official government stats, are important parts of the NBER's recession calls. If you don't trust the economic stats from the government than the whole idea of "official recession" goes out the window, as do most ways of determining "unofficially" that we are in recession. Also even if we assume that NBER's calls are MUCH more reliable than the government's (or perhaps more reasonably and more importantly that its definition is better), the fact remains that NBER's calls don't amount to, or support the claim that, "its official". Not that "its official" is necessarily an important consideration.