Indicators May Show a Recession Underway

An economic research group said Wednesday that its prediction of the first U.S. recession in a decade is moving from forecast to fact.

“The indicators which define a recession are now in patterns seen only in recessions,” said Anirvan Banerji, research director for the Economic Cycle Research Institute.

ECRI, a private New York firm that tracks business cycles, said in March that the broad array of composite indexes it designed to predict recessions and recoveries had begun to warn that the economy was in more than a mild downturn.

ECRI last made a recession call in February 1990, several months before the official onset of the recession that year. Although most textbooks define recessions as two straight quarters of shrinking gross domestic product--which has not yet happened--ECRI said the economy has met nearly all criteria under the definition used by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s arbiter of the start and end of recessions.