U.S. In Recession Says Former NBER Head

A couple weeks ago, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said that the National Bureau of Economic Research is the organization that officially calls a recession, and he also said recessions are often called after the fact. Today former NBER president Martin Feldstein said in a speech that the U.S. has entered a recession and “…the situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad…” He also said that this recession could be “substantially more severe” than recent ones.

So while the NBER still hasn’t called it (ostensibly because the U.S. hasn’t met the official definition of two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth), their former chief has.