Are we in the Great Recession I've been hearing about?

It depends on what the change in the GDP was during the third quarter of the year. A recession is usually defined as two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth in the economy as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The GDP decline in the 2nd quarter was the worst in history. It would be hard for the economy to not have improved a little bit from such a low point. The preliminary calculation won’t be out until the end of the month, but early guesses are that the economy grew about 10% from July 1 to September 30.

Based on that, we are not in a real recession like we were in the Bush years.

This is just a good recession. The Great Recession was the one from 2008 or so, that lasted until 2015 when Obama had the economy back and running.,

I would say , yes.

I’m better off now than I was 4 years ago. And I’m not alone.