Word: nber
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...chief Presidential Economic Adviser Paul McCracken puts it, "The word itself is not an unambiguously precise term." There is really only one reliable definition: if experts of the National Bureau of Economic Research decide to call a business decline a recession, so shall it be known. But the NBER only identifies recessions long after they have begun, and by a complex process that yields no hard and fast criteria. The behavior of gross national product, industrial production, employment, personal income and many other statistics are matched against their performance in past periods designated as recessions, and NBER analysts decide...