• Tag Archives recession

  • Yearning for a Time Already Lost

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    1 71%  17%  0mph SW bar30.36  falls  windchill1  Winter

                Full Winter Moon

    Bill Schmidt commented on the last post, asking how I interpret the data in the box.

    My reading of this data is that enactment of stimulus packages can be taken as somewhat reliable indicators that a recession is over, not starting.  I say somewhat because, though I see no data here that contradicts that statement, attaching cause and effect stretches the data.  Even so, it seems to me that history teaches us that recessions strike before any can diagnose them (see my late post on January 17th) and that this data suggests that by the time national concern, especially at the legislative and executive levels of government, reaches an ignition point for action that the recession is either behind us or on its last legs.  That said, everything I can see for 2008 suggests a rocky road, but that is not inconsistent with a recession troughing and beginning to ease into a recovery.  As Captain Piccard used to say, Let it be so.

    Watched Rambo II tonight.  Yes, it’s my shadow side, or the side of me that doesn’t get enough real life action, whatever, but I did get a wonderful metaphor from it near the end.  Rambo, of course, gets routinely shafted by the gubberment and this movie is no exception.  Before he leaves on his mission, he’s shown the very latest in technology that exists just to back him up.  At the end, after defeating everybody (Russians, Viet Cong, American Bureaucrats), he goes into the room with a 50 caliber machine gun on one arm, a magazine of shells draped over his other and blasts all the technology.  We could call it rage against the machine or, the man of action versus the man at the computer console, a not unfamiliar theme in today’s movies.  I read it as a contemporary John Henry fable, much the same as Gary Kasparov against Big Blue.  The common thread in all three is that they yearn for a time when particular human skills had not been mechanized or programmed.  The most important point of all three is that they yearn for a time already acknowledged as lost.

    Also, Rambo says, I don’t know whether it’s original though I doubt it, “To win at war you must become war.”  Or, was that the Italian Stallion?


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  • A Recession? We’ll Know When It’s Over.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    2  74% 23%  0mph WSW bar29.84 windchill2  Winter

                    Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

    This is not my area of expertise, but the economy is something none of us can afford to ignore.  A recession for some of us is a depression for others.  While poking around on the net about just what constitutes a recession, I happened onto the following information. 

    The folks who make the official decision about whether or not we are in a recession work at the National Bureau for Economic Research.  They gather in an aptly named Business Cycle Dating Committee.  Here are the criteria they use:

    “The National Bureau’s Business Cycle Dating Committee maintains a chronology of the U.S. business cycle. The chronology identifies the dates of peaks and troughs that frame economic recession or expansion. The period from a peak to a trough is a recession and the period from a trough to a peak is an expansion. According to the chronology, the most recent peak occurred in March 2001, ending a record-long expansion that began in 1991. The most recent trough occurred in November 2001, inaugurating an expansion.

    A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades.”

    The most interesting part to me is that they never “call” a recession until the data is available.  In a Q & A on their website is this entry:

    Q: Typically, how long after the beginning of a recession does the BCDC declare that a recession has started?

    A: Anywhere from 6 to 18 months. We never consider forecasts. In general, the BCDC does not meet until it is reasonably clear that a downturn has occurred.

    This means we probably won’t know for sure we’ve been in a recession until we’re just about out of it since recessions tend to be brief.  According to the Business Cycle Dating Committee. 


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