Telling Us What We Already Knew (But Glad It's Finally Out in the Open)

The National Bureau of Economic Research made it official today: The U.S. economy slipped into recession in December 2007, as we here at B3 had told you most recently here in November (when I wrote, "It will be December 2007."). Some are now claiming that the NBER has gone "into the tank" because the first and second quarters of 2008 printed positive GDP.

I'm left wondering if the likes of Larry "Goldilocks" Kudlow, Brian "The Economy's Fine, Really" Wesbury, Don "Stocks are 45% Undervalued When the S&P was at 1400" Luskin, et. al., are going to now acknowledge how pathetically wrong they were. Had the problems confronting us been properly recognized, perhaps more (than an ultimately useless stimulus package) could have been done to prevent the crisis we're now in. But, as I've been saying, it was simply too politically expedient to look the other way, say "Goldilocks" and move on. If I had the time, I would really like to chronicle the idiocy of late-2007 and early-2008, all the denial, the "decoupling" theories, all the other bullsh*t that was being spread far and wide.

So now we're twelve months in. The 1981 - 82 and 1973 - 75 recessions each lasted 16 months, and they're the longest since August 1929 - March 1933. If those two are any guide (and I have serious doubts that they are), we may be done with this one by spring. But my spidey senses tell me this is going to be, regrettably, deeper and more prolonged than even '81 and '73.

Jobs number on Friday. Consensus is for -300k. I think worse.

ADDING: Not only was nothing done proactively to prevent the current crisis, Barry Ritholtz points out that the Bushies actually did what they could to exacerbate it. See here and here.