Double Dip, Followed By Triple Dip, Followed By Over The Cliff Completely

These guys sound like they are in an ice cream parlor. Double dip recession? When did the first dip end? When did it start? Where are the sprinkles and tiny walnuts?

When has job growth been good over the last few years? It's SLOWED? How would you notice? It's the difference between a turtle and a snail. Neither one of them is exactly a world class sprinter.

Plus, how can you use "history as a guide?" When in recorded history have housing prices been in such a consistent decline? That would be...NEVER. When have we faced a recession double dip after fifteen years of outsourcing. Again...NEVER. But the economists are still using models from the Nixon years to weigh this out. Best insight here is the "vicious cycle" comment. No shit! Give that man a cigar.

Dudes, it's permanent. This isn't going away. Dip that, baby.

If history is a guide, the odds that the American economy is falling into a double-dip recession have risen sharply in recent weeks and may even have reached 50 percent.

Hiring has slowed to barely a crawl. History shows that meager job growth happens near recessions. Economies have a strong self-reinforcing nature. When people are optimistic, they spend, which begets hiring and then more spending. When people are anxious, they pull back, which leads to a cycle of hiring freezes and further anxiety that often lasts for months.

The United States appears to have entered some version of the vicious cycle. Most ominously, job growth has slowed to a pace that typically signals the start of a recession.

Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one. From early 2010 through this spring, by contrast, employment was growing fast enough to make the economy look as if it were in a recovery, albeit a modest one.

“The chances that we are in something that is going to feel like a recession are close to 100 percent,” said Joshua Shapiro of MFR Inc. in New York, who has diagnosed the economy more accurately than many other forecasters lately. “Whether we reach the technical definition” — which is determined by a committee of academic economists and based on gross domestic product, employment and other factors — “I think is probably close to 50-50.”

[New York Times]