clipped from: www.slate.com The question of whether the U.S. economy is in a recession is, at this point, a matter of decimal points. Since the population grows faster than 1 percent, anyway, Wednesday's announcement of a 0.6 percent rise in gross domestic product for the first quarter is functionally a drop.
The real question now is: How bad could it get? Are we facing another version of the brief recession of 1990-'91, which, as James Fallows once memorably wrote, "was over by the time it was identified"? Or are we going to be wearing barrels for clothes and burning Ikea furniture to heat our homes, in a rerun of the Great Depression?