By Any Other Name

It's like a Monty Python skit. For over a year the economy has been inexorably sliding downhill while government officials, economists, and pundits have argued about whether or not we were in a recession yet. Meanwhile, the folks in the Federal Bureau of Economic Research, who presumably have the last word on this, kept saying nope, not yet, until the other day, that is, when they declared, "oh, by the way, we just decided we've been in a recession since this time last year." I wonder if they were able to keep a straight face when they said it.