What criteria must be met for a recession?

Question

plz provide websites of your sources

Answer 1

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.

http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions.html

__________

Answer 2

Two straight quarters of GDP decline..

The last recession we had was the Y2K bubble/911 recession and it was a light one... we have been in another boom since sometime in 2002

Is this another homework question?

**I'll add to this.... It can be argued (and hard to argue against) that globalization and the outsourcing of jobs to places such as China and Inda actually is fueling this economy regardless of how incompetant the leaders in congress (the purse) and how careless our executive branch are. What's going on now in more than a few developing countries is similar to the rise of the USA in the 19th century, only it's exponentially bigger and is happening at a much faster pace. You can thank Al Gore for inventing the Internet, which is what makes the global economic boom possible.

Answer 3

Recession is part of a trade cycle. A period of rapid growth in an economy is followed be a gradual or equally rapid fall, as we say what goes up must come down!