December 1, 2008 (LPAC)--The National Bureau of Economic Research today announced that the U.S. economy entered into recession in December 2007. It is the first official recession since 2001. According to NBER's way of calculating these things, the economy had been expanding for 73 months, since November 2001, before it entered recession in December.

We hate to criticize the eminent economists who sit on NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee, the body which makes the official recession calls, but their analysis is statistical nonsense. They don't know the difference between productive activity and overhead, and thus haven't a clue about the real state of the economy. Lyndon LaRouche, whose record on economic forecasting puts the NBER to shame, has shown that the U.S. economy has been in continuous decline, measured in physical terms, since the 1967-1968 period. That's four decades of recession, which has escalated in recent years to a full-blown depression. There has been no economic expansion at all--the tumor has grown, but not the patient. Further, the NBER dates the start of the recession some five months after the global financial system collapsed, setting off a chain-reaction collapse of financial institutions, businesses and households, and leading to the biggest financial bailout in history, with much larger explosions yet to come.

All NBER really showed with its too little, too late announcement, is that it is totally irrelevant.