That's a truly amazing, contrafactual, claim. Do y

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US GDP shrank 4.8% in the first quarter amid biggest contraction since the financial crisis



PUBLISHED WED, APR 29 20208:33 AM EDTUPDATED WED, APR 29 20209:49 AM EDT

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/us-gdp-q1-202...ading.html





The U.S. is ‘officially’ in a recession—but economists say it’s far from a typical downturn

Published Tue, Jun 9 20204:33 PM EDTUpdated Tue, Jun 9 20204:51 PM EDT

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/09/us-officially...-2008.html

The U.S. is officially experiencing an economic recession, according to a Monday statement from private non-profit research organization National Bureau of Economic Research. While many experts and economists generally define a recession as a GDP decline in back-to-back quarters, they defer to NBER to officially make the call.

“In deciding whether to identify a recession, the committee weighs the depth of the contraction, its duration and whether economic activity declined broadly across the economy,” the National Bureau of Economic Research said in a statement Monday.

The organization concluded that the “unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warrants the designation of this episode as a recession, even if it turns out to be briefer than earlier contractions.”

Economists say the factors leading up to the current economic slowdown, such as how fast it hit and who it is affecting, are different from previous economic downturns and may lead to a different outcome.

It’s a “very unusual circumstance that we find ourselves in,” says Cecilia Rouse, an economist and the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. “Covid-19 has already exacted an immense impact on the economy.”


The scope of the current recession is wide

“The most distinguishing characteristic is that this [downturn] is so much more pervasive,” Stiglitz says. The Great Recession was an economic slowdown that began in finance and trickled down to the rest of the economy, Stiglitz says. But now, everyone is affected. It’s hitting everywhere all at once, from travel to food service to health care.

That makes it difficult for the government to boost economic activity and end the recession. Typically, when the private sector is not fully functioning, the public sector steps in to help, Rouse says.

That public sector role is usually taken on by federal and state governments, particularly during economic downturns. During the Great Depression, for example, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created the Works Progress Administration, which put over 8 million Americans to work on public projects.

“What’s unusual here is we actually don’t necessarily even want people out doing the kinds of things that the federal government could have them do,” Rouse says. “We don’t want people in groups of more than 10 people together.”

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