US Gross Domestic Product contracted by 0.6% in the second quarter of 2022, the Commerce Department said Thursday in its final reading for the period that confirmed the country was in a recession, on paper at least
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th September, 2022) US Gross Domestic Product contracted by 0.6% in the second quarter of 2022, the Commerce Department said Thursday in its final reading for the period that confirmed the country was in a recession, on paper at least.
"Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.6 percent in the second quarter of 2022, following a decrease of 1.6 percent in the first quarter," the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a unit within the Commerce Department, said in a news release.
Conventionally, two straight quarters of GDP decline place an economy in a recession.
Officials at the Federal Reserve have, however, argued that the US economy was far more robust than the textbook definition of a recession, pointing especially at the nation's jobs market, which has been the juggernaut of its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Unemployment among Americans reached a record high rate of 14.8% in April 2020, with the loss of some 20 million jobs after the COVID-19 breakout. Since then, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been added every month, with the trend keeping up in August. Weekly jobs statistics have also been stellar, with the number of Americans filing for unemployment falling to a five-month low last week, according to data on Thursday from the Labor Department.
