Commentary
Last week, this space speculated that the next recession may never be called what it is. Government agencies rely entirely on the National Bureau for Economic Research to call it either way. In October 2020, the NBER posted a clarification that it does not accept the textbook definition of two successive quarters of output decline but instead deploys a more holistic view.
As an example of such a deployment, NBER lists March-April 2020 as a recession due to the severity of the downturn and the high levels of unemployment. It’s hard to disagree with that judgment, though it was one of the strangest recessions in history: it was entirely forced by lockdowns. NBER in this case was using a stricter definition than the textbook….