WH Press Secretary Refuses to Define What Is a Recession

EXCERPT:

JEAN-PIERRE: "Again, we don’t — we don’t — I’m not going to define it from here. I’m just going to leave it to the NBER, as we have stated, and how they define recession."

COLLINS: "So you want declare one until they have declare it one?"

JEAN-PIERRE: "I’m just saying that we’re just not going to define it. We use the indicators that the NBER, the National Bureau of Economic Research, have used. We’ve mentioned that a few times. Going to your question about how sometimes it’s late, look, I think what — not even I think. What the point that we’re trying to make here is that we have a strong labor market, which you don’t normally see in a recession. That is very uncommon to see that. When you see an average of 400,000 jobs created per month, when you see an unemployment at 3.6, which is historical, that does not — that does not define a recession. And so, that’s what we point you to.”