Nixon's Recession?

Investors, executives, blue-collar workers and just about everybody else agree that the U.S. economy has been suffering through a recession. But most of President Nixon's aides have avoided that word, preferring to describe their engineered economic slowdown as an "adjustment" or a "recedence." The semantic tug of war might seem to be only an academic matter, but it could have important political consequences in the 1972 election. Nixon figures that the last recession cost him the presidency in 1960.

The official referee in such matters is the private, nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, which judges by scrutinizing real gross national production, unemployment, corporate profits and other indicators. N.B.E.R.'s experts are now strenuously debating the correct label to place on the slump. Says Vice President F. Thomas luster: "We're right on the fine edge between calling it the most severe downturn that was not a recession--or one of the mildest recessions since World War II. It could go either way."

Nonetheless, it seemed clear last week that the bureau's key decision makers were leaning toward "recession." They figure that the downturn started in the autumn of 1969 and may have reached its low point in November of 1970, even though the nation is still suffering some downbeat effects. Last week the Labor Department announced that unemployment rose from 5.8% in November to 6% in December. That was the highest jobless rate since December 1961.

The N.B.E.R. is likely to pronounce its judgment in March, and the ruling may well include some redefinition of just what constitutes a recession in an era when the cyclical swings of business are less severe than in the past. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns, who labeled most of the four earlier postwar recessions when he headed the N.B.E.R., told friends as long ago as May: "They have to call it a recession. I don't see what else they can do."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.