We all know they meant "in a year", but the article isn't explicit about it -- it just says
>> the output of the world’s third-largest economy
Not "annual", not even "GDP". I bet a lot of readers came away thinking "a shortfall as big as Japan".
And maybe not just lay readers -- a "smart but not knowledgeable" reader might try to convert the stock into a flow or vice versa by assuming some interest rate and doing a back-of-the-envelope net present calculation and be off from the real numbers by an order of magnitude.
No, I’m saying there is not one, and defining it strictly as two quarters of gdp decline removes much of the utility of the business cycle dating process.
> By 2016, real manufacturing output, sans computers, was lower than it was in 2007
Maybe I just overlooked it, but I didn't see any mention of the big recession that happened on the 2007 end of that interval. A lot of industries that were hit hard in that took a very long time to recover (some still have not).
Because of that, articles that do comparisons from 2007 or thereabouts probably should include a short note explaining when whatever they are looking at recovered from that recession.
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