READING ROUNDUP FOR TUESDAY: 9.21.2010

18-month recession ended in June 2009
Megan Woolhouse/Boston Globe
“The Great Recession officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, making the 18-month-long recession the longest since the end of World War II, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge nonprofit that declares the start and end of such downturns.”
Why There’s No Joy Over the Recession’s End
Rick Newman/US News & World Report blog
“Maybe we need a new definition of ‘recession.'”


Recession’s end is already priced into stock markets
Paul Hickey/USA Today
“‘The stock market is forward-looking, and you typically see the strongest gains come in the early stages of the recovery,'” says Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group. ‘By the time the NBER gets around to (confirming when the recession ended), much of the gains are already priced in.'”
Official end of recession doesn’t spell relief
John Shoven/San Francisco Chornicle
“John Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said the bureau’s statement is simply a matter of semantics.
‘All it means is the GDP has been growing, but that is a very low bar,’ he said. ‘People feel it in their gut: These are bad times. We are in a recovery, but the recovery is so weak that it’s not creating anywhere near enough jobs to bring unemployment down meaningfully.'”
Did the Recession End 15 Months Ago?
Arnold Kling/Econolog
“We are still seeing employment growth that is below the trend rate of increase in the labor force, so the way that I think about it, we are still in a recession.”
The fat lady sings
James Hamilton/Econobrowser
“The NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee issued a statement today declaring that the bottom of the most recent recession was reached in June of 2009, with the economy in the expansion phase of the business cycle during the 15 months since then. This confirms the announcement issued by the Econbrowser Business Cycle Dating Committee last April…
So what does the statement really tell us? Simply that the economy, as measured by a variety of real economic indicators, has been growing rather than contracting for the last 15 months. Given that historically that condition of economic expansion tends to be highly persistent, in the absence of strong contrary indication, the most likely outcome is that we’ll continue to see further economic growth in the months ahead.”
NBER: The Recession Ended in June 2009
Mark Thoma/MoneyWatch.com
“It’s important to note that this is an attempt to identify the trough of the recovery. It does not say we have recovered, only that we’ve turned the corner, and it doesn’t say anything about how long it will take to reach full employment.”
Is The Recession Really Over?
John Cassidy/New Yorker
“Just when you thought that the public’s esteem for economists couldn’t go any lower, along comes a panel of ‘experts’ from the National Bureau of Economic Research and announces that the recession that began in December, 2007, ended in June, 2009. Apparently, we have been enjoying fifteen months of economic recovery.”