Euro-zone is officially in double-dip recession..

The USA is next?

Via European Voice: 

The eurozone is officially back in recession after three years of sluggish growth as the sovereign-debt crisis continues to impede recovery.

Figures out today (15 November) show that gross domestic product in the 17-country eurozone decreased by 0.1% between July and September after contracting by 0.2% in the three months before that.

The eurozone was last in recession in 2009, when the economy contracted for five successive quarters.

ECRI: If you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Who is the ECRI? They are the Economic Cycle Research Institute and they have accurately predicted ever recession for the last 15 years with no false alarms. They are telling clients to hang onto their hats; the double-dip is here.

(ECRI)- Early last week, ECRI notified clients that the U.S. economy is indeed tipping into a new recession. And there’s nothing that policy makers can do to head it off.

ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes, including the U.S. Long Leading Index, which was the first to turn down – before the Arab Spring and Japanese earthquake – to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full-blown recessions, not “soft landings.”

Last year, amid the double-dip hysteria, we definitively ruled out an imminent recession based on leading indexes that began to turn up before QE2 was announced. Today, the key is that cyclical weakness is spreading widely from economic indicator to indicator in a telltale recessionary fashion.

Why should ECRI’s recession call be heeded? Perhaps because, as The Economist has noted, we’ve correctly called three recessions without any false alarms in-between. In contrast, most of those who’ve accurately predicted a recession or two have also been guilty of crying wolf – in 2010, 2005, 2003, 1998, 1995, or 1987.

A new recession isn’t simply a statistical event. It’s a vicious cycle that, once started, must run its course. Under certain circumstances, a drop in sales, for instance, lowers production, which results in declining employment and income, which in turn weakens sales further, all the while spreading like wildfire from industry to industry, region to region, and indicator to indicator. That’s what a recession is all about. Keep on reading...

The Double-Dip Recession May Have Started in April

We have to hope this isn't true, but the data is frightening and data does not lie.

(Zero Hedge) — There may be those among the less than brainwashed lemmingerati out there who have noticed what, as we have pointed out for the past month when reporting on the various manufacturing and regional Fed indices, has been an epic collapse in the appropriate data series. As John Lohman so kindly demonstrates, the two month implosion has been beyond epic, and while certainly the biggest drop in the past decade, may also be the all time worst ever.

To the point of this post: the last time we had an economic contraction of this magnitude was back in February of 2008, which was two months into the most acute recession in post-depression history. We are confident that once the groupthink wraps its head around the fact that the auto production based renaissance is not coming, and the economy officially tumbles into the commode of Ben Bernanke’s fiat dungeon, the NBER will determine (with an appropriate 12-18 month delay), that the current recession started in April of 2011.

We can rest easy. Obama isn't concerned about a double-dip recession.

If you were as rich as President Obama, you wouldn't have to be concerned either.

(RCP) — “I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession, I’m concerned that the fact that the recovery we’re on is not producing jobs as quickly as I wanted to happen. Prior to this month, we have seen three months of very robust job growth in the private sector. And, so we are very encouraged by that. This month, we still saw job growth in the private sector, but it slowed down,” President Obama said at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.