Our good friends at the National Bureau of Economic Research have made it official; the U. S. economy has been in recession since December 2007. For what it’s worth, the US.RECESSION.08 contract is up 5.5 points on this news, with the last trade occurring at 97.4. The contract rules define recession as constituting two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, and since this information has yet to be officially released by the government, it is still an actively traded contract.

Since we are nearly 1 year into this recession, this already qualifies as one of the longer recessions since the Great Depression. Apparently the longest one since then occurred 1973-1975 and lasted around 15 months. At this point, it would appear highly likely that we’ll be setting a new record with this recession. The “good” news is that the Intrade US.DEPRESSION.09 contract (which defines depression as a cumulative decline in GDP of more than 10.0% over four consecutive quarters) last traded at 13.6, which represents a 1.3 point drop on the day.