by Calculated Risk on 3/09/2008 02:04:00 PM

This is a hot topic right now.

From Professor DeLong on Bloomberg TV: Are We in a Recession?

Lindsey:... Are we in a recession?

DeLong: Probably. If we are not in a recession we are teetering on the edge. The [q]uestion is: will there be a big recession or a small recession, or only a near-recession that feels like a recession to an awful lot of people. Those thousands of jobs that were not there that we thought would be.
...
Lindsey: At the conference [SIEPR 2008 Economic Summit], what is the mood? what are you in your colleagues talking about?

DeLong: That we might as well be in a recession and we should treat it as long as far as economic policy is concerned. hank paulson will be here this evening reassuring everybody, larry summers was here this morning scaring everyone.

From Professon Hamilton at Econbrowser: Has the recession started?

It will still be many months before we would expect to see an "official" declaration that a recession has indeed begun from the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Granted, the latest data look recessionary. But the Committee would be pondering the following: suppose these data are revised up or next month's numbers start to improve. Would what has happened so far be enough to characterize as a recession? The answer is pretty clearly no, and that is why no declaration from NBER will be forthcoming any time soon.
...
In the mean time, though, if you want to claim that the recession has begun, that now strikes me as quite a reasonable working hypothesis.

And from The Times: Britain shivers as US hits recession

AMERICA’s economy is definitely in recession, economists say, amid growing fears that the credit crunch is entering its most dangerous phase.

I think the economy is in recession, but Jim Hamilton is correct - we need several more months of negative numbers (that don't get revised away) to make it official. And DeLong is correct: the more important question is how severe the downturn will be.