It is now official, the folks at the National Bureau of Economic Research have decided that we are in a recession that began at about this time in 2007.

Why, you may ask, did it take them so long? For which question Wonks Anonymous has some answers:

• Economists generally do better on the job market than the rest of us. Maybe it took that long for the friends of the folks at the NBER to lose their jobs.
• It is hard to tell the difference between painfully slow growth with stagnant wages - the standard for a Republican boom - and a slowly shrinking economy with stagnant wages - which would be a recession.

Now that the economy has taken a definitive nose dive the folks at the NBER can look back and state with confidence that things started to go bad about a year ago. Which also means that we are pushing the record for post war slumps.

If it has already been a year can we start to climb out of this hole soon? Wonks Anonymous would like to be optimistic but he is not because he remembers a little story from his days of teaching macroeconomics.

There is this thing called the multiplier. It works like this:

1. Recessions start because people cut back on their purchasing and firms find that they have unsold goods sitting around.
2. Firms cut back on production because they can't sell what they already have at a profit. When they cut back, they lay off workers.
3. People who get laid off cut back on their consumption.
4. Return to step one and repeat until you hit the bottom.

We are nowhere near the bottom. We teetered at the edge for most of 2008 until the financial market crash pushed us over. We are now bouncing down a very steep slope and gathering momentum.

If we had a real government that cared about ordinary people we would be working on a fiscal stimulus right now. Instead we have some 45 more days of unchecked descent.

There has been no president who could even hope to touch the accomplishments of G W Bush.