Well, duh. We needed a group of economists to tell us what we already know and felt for a long time. And you have to wonder: were they asleep since it took them until now to tell us that, by their reckoning, the recession began a year ago. From the Financial Times:

Evidence of a global slide towards a deep recession mounted on Monday with severe strain reported by manufacturing companies around the world, large falls in car sales across Europe and bad construction figures in the US.

So clear were the signs of downturn in the US that the National Bureau of Economic Research, the most prestigious US independent economic authority, said the country had been in recession since December 2007.[emphasis added]

   Call me demanding but the word "prestigious" does not quite seem to go with "oh, it’s been going on for a year". But, never mind…and it could be very bad, as yours truly has been warning for many, many months, and The New York Times admits:

The United States economy officially sank into a recession last December, which means that the downturn is already longer than the average for all recessions since World War II, according to the committee of economists responsible for dating the nation’s business cycles.

In declaring that the economy has been in a downturn for almost 12 months, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed what many Americans had already been feeling in their bones.

But private forecasters warned that this downturn was likely to set a new postwar record for length and likely to be more painful than any recession since 1980 and 1981.

“We will rewrite the record book on length for this recession,” said Allen Sinai, president of Decision Economics in Lexington, Mass. “It’s still arguable whether it will set a new record on depth. I hope not, but we don’t know.”

   So, I have never liked a lot of the government statistics that get thrown out at us, partly because they don’t tell us much and partly because they lack context. The "deep recession" really has been a factor in workers lives for a very long time. I would make the argument that it goes back three decades.

   Since the 1970s, wages have not kept pace with productivity. That is, people have been working more efficiently–no matter what the elites say about people needing to work harder–but they haven’t seen the benefits of that hard work in their paychecks. So, instead, they’ve financed their lives on credit cards and borrowing. To me, that’s the real context for the recession.

   Last question: raise your hands if you think our political leaders understand the longer-term recession and what they need to do about it.