It will come as no shock whatsoever to readers here that the long-held criteria for defining a technical recession has now been met. According to the initial estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP for the United States contracted during the second quarter in a row, Julius Shiskin’s widely used metric for the onset of economic recession.

The decrease in real GDP reflected decreases in private inventory investment, residential fixed investment, federal government spending, state and local government spending, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by increases in exports and personal consumption expenditures (PCE). Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased (table 2).

Investment shrank, residential investment spending shrank, government spending shrank, inflation increased.

Stagflation 2.0 continues to get deeper.