he s actually done. so there s never any upside in letting joe biden speak injo public. d but unfortunately for the white house, sometimes you don t have a choice. disasters happenn ha. and when they do, the public expect somebody to pretend to be president. the american economy a is currently a disaster. therefore, joe biden had to h talk. so his aides dutifully let him out to the podium today to say something edifying about it. what happened next has got to be one of the weirdest presidential briefings ever conducted. new economic numbers show has declined for two quarters in a row. that s the definition of a recession. we re in a recession. that s why joe biden had tofi hold the briefingng. and yet biden never once mentioned those numbers, not a single time other than that, mrs. lincoln, how was the play? it was completely bizarre. instead, biden simply announced that there is no recession in the united states no matter what you may have noticed aboutt your own country. i
the technical definition of recession. cess to be thed same . ben white, the sameit political pundit. and then ine? january of this year, which is twenty, twenty two , we think the ap reported the same thingrt and we re quoting mexico snt economy entered a technical recession at the end ofcess last year with two consecutive quarters of contraction. oh, wow. so it turns out that wasri the definition prior to two weeks. in fact, that s beendi the definition for decades. in fact, to find it in everyctco economic textbook i ve written, it s all over the archives, the ap, which because we re paid to doen, we slog through today. here s one example of what french economy fallsench back i recession, the ap reported back in 2013. here s a direct quote from the article a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters dive of negative grow oh, you re not insane. no one goes you you re not. hallucinating. even cnn used to sayay this is cnn white house correspondent john harwood wrote on augusto