That is a shame, because people, including Yellen’s boss, used to like to use the word a lot. In October 2020, when he was running for office, Joe
The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. Former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body....said "President Obama and I left Donald Trump
...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US...
a booming economy — and he caused a recession. He squandered it just like he has everything else he’s inherited in his life." He said the same thing in September 2020, claiming that American was in a "recession created by Donald Trump’s negligence."
Fast forward a couple of years and The White House is now reframing the meaning of the word and warning us all not to use it. It is true that until yesterday it was generally agreed that two straight quarters of negative GDP growth was the common definition of a recession. But yesterday President Biden said, "That doesn’t sound like a recession to me." This fact should surprise no one.
Because re-naming things is one of the left’s favorite pastimes. If you cannot change the facts then you can at least change the language around the facts. By doing so you can massage the facts, make them less concerning and in the process wish reality away. For a time, at least.
Remember the redefinition of another word: the "T" word. "Transitory" was the word Biden used after the third stimulus package in an attempt to claim that inflation was a fleeting issue. Back then he was dismissing inflation as a nothing-burger — all to do with supply chains that were being fixed anyhow. But many months later and the inflation is still with us. It turns out that things that are "Transitory" can stay around a lot longer than we thought.