Newly Corporate

There may still be a recession in our future but, all too often, we fall for the doomsaying in the media before we actually look at the numbers (Keep Your Head Despite Recession Fears). As young professionals looking to lead in the workforce or start our own companies, we cannot afford to fall for the hype. Here is the latest on the “recession”:

“What do you call a recession where the economy keeps going up and up, even if a bit sluggishly? Well, my friends, you call that an expansion. And that is what we seem to have right now, despite all the economic doomsaying about a recession or even a Great Depression 2.0. Today, the Commerce Department revised its first-quarter estimate of gross domestic product upward to 0.9 percent from 0.6 percent. That follows 0.6 percent GDP growth in the final quarter of 2007. The revision also makes it more likely that the second quarter will be positive, maybe 1.5 percent, maybe even higher.
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Now I went back and checked the numbers for the past 50 years and didn’t find a single case of a recession—as calculated by the National Bureau of Economic Research—that started with or contained two straight quarters of positive GDP growth, much less three quarters. “

- James Pethokoukis, US News and World Report