The U.S. economy has declined for the second-straight quarter as the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 0.9% in Q2. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s summary of the U.S. GDP follows the recent debate over the technical definition of a recession.
America’s Q2 GDP Data Points to a Recession
One of the principal agencies of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), released the commerce department’s latest gross domestic product (GDP) statistics on Thursday. The report notes that the GDP data shows a 0.9% annualized decrease in economic growth during the second quarter.
“Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022,” the BEA report explains. “The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 8.2 percent in the second quarter, compared with an increase of 8.0 percent in the first quarter.”
A number of economists and analysts mocked U.S. bureaucrats and members of the Federal Reserve for horrible economic predictions. “Just a friendly reminder that the Fed in December put out a 4% GDP growth forecast for 2022,” Northman Trader analyst Sven Henrich tweeted on Thursday. Lots of people on social media thanked U.S. president Joe Biden in a sarcastic manner for the country’s economic downturn. Most tweets loudly exclaimed that the U.S. is in fact in a recession after the country’s GDP declined by 0.9% in Q2.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Claims 2 Decling GDPs Is ‘Not the Definition’ of a Recession
A week before the BEA released the GDP data, the Biden administration published two blog posts that claim two GDP declines in a row does not constitute a recession. This sparked a heated debate across the country on social media as numerous analysts, economists, websites, and textbooks state the very opposite. The BEA’s report on Thursday fueled the debate further; as many individuals insisted that the U.S. economy is most definitely in a recession.
When the White House correspondent for Fox News Peter Doocy asked the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “If things are going so great, why are White House officials are redefining recession?” Jean-Pierre replied “We are not.” After the comment, Doocy stressed that a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth… How is that not redefining recession?” Jean-Pierre insisted “That’s not the definition.”
Even the economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman told the public to “ignore the two-quarter rule… We might have a recession, but we aren’t in one now.” Gemini exchange co-founder Cameron Winklevoss explained that he doesnt believe the Biden administration’s experts.
“According to the White House and the ‘experts’ that be, we’re not in recession,” Winklevoss wrote on Thursday. “According to the numbers (two consecutive quarters of declining GDP), we’re in a recession. I trust the numbers because the numbers don’t lie, people do.”
The BEA’s GDP report follows the U.S. Federal Reserve raising the federal funds rate 75 basis points (bps) for a second time in a row this week. “The Fed is working expeditiously to bring inflation down,” the Fed’s chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday.
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