Still No Recession

Uncle Tupelo would be happy - there's apparently still no recession in the United States. Carpe Diem links to the newest numbers. Q2 was 1.9%. The intrade contract on "are we in a recession - 2008" is down to 20%. The intrade contract on "recession in 2009" is at 52%, but it's a fairly low volume contract at this point. The Intrade contracts are interesting, but they are fulfilled if the economy experiences two quarters of negative economic growth. The NBER actually decides whether we are in a recession, though, and they don't use that metric. Still, it's interesting and encouraging to see so far that the economy is doing a good dodge and weave. Perhaps the Fed's interventions have been successful at limiting the damage from the subprime problems. What would GDP have been had nothing been done? That counterfactual is always the one to keep in mind when interpreting positive data like these.