in case you were in a cave and unaware

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: "The world's largest economy contracted at a 0.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of last year compared with a previously reported 0.6 percent gain, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Growth for the period from 2005 through 2007 was also trimmed.

'We're in a recession,' Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. 'It's going to widen, it's going to deepen.'

Nine of the 13 quarters under review were revised down, three increased and one was unchanged.

The largest downward revision was for the last three months of 2007, as the previously reported 2.3 percent gain in consumer spending was reduced by more than half, to 1 percent. Americans cut back on the use of electricity and gas as fuel bills soared."