(Chris Parker, Headline USA) If you believe that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP numbers constitute a recession, you’re probably a racist.
That’s the message coming from one senior CNN editor, reported Fox News.
Allison Morrow of CNN Business began an article for the network’s newsletter by expressing her confusion with a headline “Are we in a recession? Yes. No. Maybe.”
She then dutifully parroted the White House’s claim that the standard used for years to define the start of a recession isn’t an official metric.
“The US economy shrank in the second quarter of the year, and that does indeed meet the unofficial criteria for being in a recession. But, as you probably noticed, we’re not rolling out the R-word in any definitive way yet,” she wrote.
She then challenged the motivation of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s panel charged with defining a recession.
“In the United States, a recession is determined by a panel of eight economists you’ve never heard of at the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research,” she wrote.
“That seems weird, right? For starters, every single one of the eight members is White, and in fact the panel has never included a person of color.”
She attacked the panel for their ages and gender, noting that, “Each is over 60 years old…There are just two women, one of whom is married to another member.”
After that, Morrow declared recession claims were likely premature since “the data can and probably will change.” CNN believed Morrow’s cheerleading analysis will cross a “symbolic recession threshold,” according its homepage headline.
Historically, data showing a decline in GDP across two consecutive quarters has been used to define a recession. John Harwood, CNN’s far-left White House correspondent, tweeted as much during Trump’s presidency in 2019: “recession = economy shrinks for two quarters.”
However, it seems he also changed his mind in line with the Biden White House. Yesterday, he retweeted a comment that opined, “The White House is pretty obviously right that even two quarters of shrinking GDP would not show the economy is currently in recession.
