No Recession Yet

The financial gurus are wrong again as the economy posted a 0.6% growth rate. Slow growth but growth nonetheless. So all the chicken littles who were already predicting a recession have egg on their collective faces. When do we know we're in a recession? Not until we have two negative quarters of negative growth. (Tim)

The bruised economy limped through the first quarter of this year at a six-tenths of a percentage point growth rate as housing and credit problems forced people and businesses alike to hunker down.
The country's economic growth during January through March was the same as in the final three months of last year, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday -- but not the kind of statistic that economists define as a recession. Although the economy is stuck in a rut, it is still managing to keep growing -- however slightly.
The Commerce Department said on Wednesday that gross domestic product or GDP expanded at a 0.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, matching the fourth quarter's advance.
GDP is the broadest measure of total economic activity within U.S. borders and are an initial measure of first-quarter performance and will be revised twice in coming months.
The report was issued just before Federal Reserve policy-makers began a second day of deliberations that is expected to result in a decision to trim official interest rates another quarter percentage point to try to keep expansion going.
A Fed announcement of its decision, which may include a signal that it will halt its rate reduction campaign, will be issued in early afternoon.
Consumer spending that fuels two-thirds of economic activity through consumption of goods and services, grew at the weakest rate since the second quarter of 2001, when the economy was last in recession.
It rose at a 1 percent rate after growing 2.3 percent in the fourth quarter.
The weakening in an already distressed housing sector was even more striking.
Spending on residential construction plunged at a 26.7 percent rate - a ninth straight quarterly decline and the biggest for any three months since the end of 1981.