Yes and no (but mostly yes).
Officially, NBER calls recessions. Colloquially, the definition has been “two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth”. Everyone, including every single one of my 400 level Econ profs and textbooks, used the colloquial definition because NBER would always call it when we got those two negative quarters.
Except last time, they didn’t. And of course, the media deboonkers instantly flooded the zone with “ackshually that’s never been the definition”. A few days later, the economist shills came out with copes about how this time is structurally different because The Coof and we shouldn’t expect an actual recession. None of their arguments were very convincing to me.
But then it turned out they were right! GDP growth resumed, employment was slowly starting to stabilize, Joe did it again. And yet with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the recession was “avoided” with massive government spending and infinite low wage migrants taking all that job growth (which contributed to the decrease in inflation in maybe the most harmful way possible).
Arguably the only way to prevent a recession would have been to continue Biden’s insane spending and migration policies, which was never going to happen under Trump. I think this realization is behind a lot of the Treasury Sec’s recession hinting rhetoric. DOGE and tariffs will contribute, but I don’t see the recession being particularly deeper or longer lasting because of them - assuming we don’t get in a protracted trade war.
