Commerce Department data this week found the U.S. economy shrank for a second quarter in a row, sparking a new debate about whether the nation is in a recession.

Negative growth in two consecutive quarters fulfills a common definition for a recession — and it’s the official way of making such a call in some countries.


But it’s not in the U.S., where a relatively under-the-radar group — the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee — is in charge of making an official call on whether the country is in a recession.

So what is this group, and how does it make its proclamations?

The group within the NBER that actually makes the call on the recession is the Business Cycle Dating Committee.

It has eight members, who are among the foremost economists in the nation, and who all who work at top academic institutions across the country: Robert Hall of Stanford, Robert Gordon of Northwestern, James Poterba of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Valerie Ramey of the University of California-San Diego, Christina Romer of UC-Berkeley, David Romer of UC-Berkeley, James Stock of Harvard and Mark Watson of Princeton.

Christina Romer served as chairwoman of the council of economic advisers under President Obama, and Poterba is the president of the NBER.

The NBER’s formal definition of a recession is broad. According to its frequently asked questions page, the NBER’s traditional definition is “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

It considers the depth, diffusion and duration of the decline in economic activity. While the committee’s view is that each “needs to be met individually to some degree, extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may partially offset weaker indications from another.”

You probably know all this (JM surely does NOT), but it's certainly fair to push back on the notion that we are not in a recession despite JM's Tourette's attack.