SO NOW NPR WANTS YOU TO KNOW: Tariffs are fueling fears of a recession. What does it take to actually declare one?

A recession refers to a period of decline in economic activity. It’s one of the four stages of the economic cycle: growth, peak, contraction (or recession) and trough.

Some analysts use a rough rule of thumb to identify recessions: Two consecutive quarters of decline in a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) — the broadest measure of economic activity.

But the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) — the nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization that has become the semi-official arbiter of recessions — uses a somewhat squishier definition. It calls a recession a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

The definition doesn’t seem to have become squishier until the old definition happened on Biden’s watch. Now it will be as squishy as necessary to hang it on Trump.