As for the rest…well, Phil’s right. Blaming the current President-elect for getting the world into this mess will never be “on”.

The handful of economists who constitute the business cycle dating committee that calls recessions wasn’t issuing some profound statement as though they expected people to be shocked that we’re in a recession. They’re merely dating the turn in the business cycle — in this case the peak. And they look at a broader range of data than just GDP. In declaring last December the onset of the recession, they are essentially confirming what most of us have believed anyway — that we’ve been in the recession for some time. But now we have an official date of the start of the downturn.

I think they are considered the official arbiter because they are non-partisan and they take an academic’s reasoned view about recessions. They try to take the emotion and the politics out of making such a declaration.

Why the stock market and the news media went nuts is beyond me. Usually the NBER’s declaration of the beginning of a recession merits a brief in the business section because everybody already knows we’re in one. The market may have been looking for a good reason to go down after having gone up last week. (Today, it was back up.) Also, the fact that the NBER dated the beginning of the recession to last December might have shocked some people because that means this recession has already lasted longer than the last two — and as you note, we’ve still got a long way to go to get out of this one.

One salient political fact did come out of their declaration. This recession clearly — and officially — began under Bush and the Republican regime. No escaping that now. So while Obama may be blamed if he doesn’t get us out of the recession, he can’t be blamed by Republicans six months from now for getting us into it.

As to what constitutes a depression, I’ll have to check that out. It’s a sad commentary on our times that until now in my 40 years or so of following the economy, I haven’t had to worry about identifying when a recession becomes a depression.

(Interesting — and promising — news from Canada, BTW… I’m amazed that I haven’t heard or seen any coverage of it down here. Sounds like Harper may have met his match!…)

Meantime, we may be seeing the first coalition government in Canadian history in ninety years…