Is it a Recession? If it looks like a duck, and it sounds like a duck...

I have been watching Bloomberg TV quite a bit recently, and it makes me laugh hysterically when I see some nerdy-looking guy with glasses come on from the recession-dating committee, NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) and he says they haven't officially declared yet that the country is in a recession. One member of the committee, econmist Jeff Frankel, has said that he personally believes that there is one, but that the committee hasn't agreed upon when it has started, thus disallowing them from offically calling it a recession.

Well, with all of this conjecture, it just makes me sit here and think what has this world come to? Everyone needs to pull their heads out of their a***s and think for a second. Some people think that there surely isn't a recession, while others believe we're beginning the second Great Depression. Neither of these are true in my opinion, since the precipitous drop off of the stock market, coupled with many other weak numbers, whether it's unemployment, construction or what not, undoubtedly show a recession in our nation. Moreover, I am unequivocally sure that our country hasn't hit a second Great Depression for a number of reasons. The first being that while our current unemployment is quite dismal at 6.5%, unemployment during the Great Depression reached 25%. Additionally, with these government bailout plans, regardless of my personal feelings toward them , allow companies to stay a tad more afloat, thus thwarting any possibility of anything close to the magnitude of the Great Depression from occurring.

In summary, I recommend all of you not to get sucked into all of this asinine talk of determing the beginning of the recession in order to call it a recession, and realize that although we are not in the best of times, this unquestionably isn't the worst it has been economically speaking.