Today's economic data

2Q GDP growth was surprisingly weak, at a 3 percent annualized rate.

For now, this can be explained away by high oil prices, which Greenspan and his fellow optimists dismiss as a temporary thing.

Well, guess what, folks: the price of oil is higher today than it was at the height of its May/June spike. Will this spike have an even worse effect on the economy than the last one?

One reason to think it might not is that gasoline prices haven't gone back above $2 a gallon, which would be a real damper on consumer spending.

But gas is still at about $1.90 a gallon, which is still far higher than it was at the beginning of the year. That 10-cent difference doesn't seem likely to do much to encourage more consumer spending.

But here is the real kick in the head about this report: 2Q GDP from 2001 was revised sharply, dramatically upward, so that suddenly we no longer live in a world in which there were three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth in 2001.

In other words, according to the way some people define a recession, there was no recession in 2001.

The NBER, at least, still says there was a recession, and in fact they've talked about revising at least the starting date of the recession, to move it back into 2000.

New leadership at the NBER cycle dating committee has been inclined to use monthly GDP data, created by Macroeconomic Advisors, in setting its business cycle dates. I'll have to try to find out what that data says about the second quarter.

Anyway, this is all a bunch of semantic hoo-ha. Everybody knows there was a recession in 2001. Even with the helpful revisions, there were at least three down quarters of GDP growth between late 2000 and late 2001. Everybody knows how bad the job market was, and that's the sector of the economy given the most weight by the NBER in setting cycles in the past, and it's the one that matters most to most people.

Though there would at first blush seem to be the possibility that this could help the White House, I think it could actually hurt. They would probably want us to continue to believe that there was a recession, and that it started in the Clinton White House, and that Bush pulled us out of it.

Otherwise, if there was no recession, then that could make Bush's subsequent stewardship of the economy seem worse. After all, he would then have one less excuse for the net job loss during his first term.