This is no surprise:
The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy .
The NBER is a private group of leading economists charged with dating the start and end of economic downturns. It typically takes a long time after the start of a recession to declare its start because of the need to look at final readings of various economic measures.
The NBER said that the deterioration in the labor market throughout 2008 was one key reason why it decided to state that the recession began last year. On Friday, economists are predicting the government will report a loss of another 325,000 jobs for November.
What's worse is this may be the longest recession since WWII:
The current recession is one of the longest downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930's. The last two recessions (1990-1991 and 2001) lasted eight months each, and only two of the 10 previous post-Depression downturns lasted as long as a full year, according to the NBER.
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