Recession, of course, but what does that mean for us?

The good people who sit in a Boston bunker and proclaim recessions and economic booms took action Monday, surprising no one with the declaration that the United States entered a downturn in February.

What does that recession label mean in a fast-moving coronavirus crisis that prevents us from measuring economic activity, even to the nearest 3 million jobs?

And what does it mean for Connecticut, a state that has suffered far worse than the nation as a whole in the aftermath of two of the last three recessions?

This marks the nation’s first induced recession, ordered by law for the higher cause of saving lives — and so it might bounce back faster than any recession in history. That’s especially true considering the shutdown laws are winding down and the U.S. government is spending (and the Federal Reserve is printing) an extra $25,000 per household to claw us out of this mess.

Then again, 40 million people, 500,000 of them in Connecticut, don’t lose their jobs without enough disruption to last quite a few months. Do you feel confident enough to buy a new house or car, or quit your job to launch a company?

Precisely what happened is that the National Bureau of Economic Research pegged February as the end of the last expansion, or boom, which started 128 months earlier, in the grim days of June, 2009. It was a record dating back to at least 1854 that we know of, eclipsing the 1992-2001 growth period — and it set off a frenzy of “it’s official” cliché headlines.

It’s not that anything terrible happened in February. But in economics, a month is the basic unit of measurement and by midMarch, we tanked. On March 13, the day it all hit, I wrote that “2,000 jobless claims in one day spell recession.”

One question now is whether we were heading into a recession anyway this year or next, as the long boom wound down. Certainly the economy was weakening even without the new virus attack. That might help us know how fast this recession will pass.

The short answer is, we don’t know what will happen because forecasts are about patterns and we ain’t got none of those for this economic swoon. We might not even still be in a recession, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared on Monday, as many of the people furloughed in March and April returned to work in May.

A long downturn

Regardless of whether we’re technically still in recession — a broad, sustained decline in jobs and activity across the economy — this will feel like a downturn for many people for a long time.

“Just because the job situation looks better doesn’t mean that the economy itself is actually better,” UConn economist Fred V. Carstensen said Monday. “The whole statistical system is not set up to capture things that are happening quickly. It’s a system that sort of presumes relative stability.”

The NBER conceded as much, saying in its report, “The committee recognizes that the pandemic and the public health response have resulted in a downturn with different characteristics and dynamics than prior recessions.” Among the problems was an absurd error in which millions of furloughed workers were counted as employed in the U.S. jobs report Friday.

Carstensen and other experts said Monday the Connecticut economy will suffer worse than the nation, hobbled by massive public debt — a state budget chained to future obligations we can’t pay. And, as Carstensen put it, the state’s economy, overly dependent on old technology except in defense manufacturing, which doesn’t add many jobs, is now “disconnected from the data-driven, digitally dependent, modern economy.”

“I don’t see Connecticut embarking on a sustainable economic recovery until 2021 at the earliest,” said Donald Klepper-Smith of DataCore

Partners, who predicted an early and long recession even before the coronavirus crisis.

Yet another expert, Brian Kench, dean of the Pompea College of Business at the University of New Haven, sees the 288,000 Connecticut jobs lost in March and April alone, combined with the state’s miserable recent record of recovery.

“How long will it take to add nearly 300,000 jobs? No one can say for certain, but it will likely take a long time,” he said.

Hope for Connecticut

Call me crazy but I don’t see the picture unfolding as badly for the home team this time around as these guys predict, compared with the nation. Yes, I know, Connecticut, as we’ve documented on these pages, saw overall economic activity fall in the last decade even as the U.S. economy zoomed ahead by a whopping 19 percent.

And house prices stagnated here even as the nation saw a market so hot it worried the inflation hawks.

That’s part of the whole point. We’ve suffered so much that we’re now the cheaper alternative to New York and Boston, without all that traffic congestion and sprawl. Jobs, if you have a good one in Connecticut — a big if — pay almost as well, and the cost of living is less for most of this state, though not in Fairfield County.

And Fairfield County, even without bargains, boasts a sudden calling card that meant something once, and might again this time around: It’s not in New York, where life — and death, in the COVID-19 crisis — can devolve quickly.

“Houses are selling right now, inventory is very low,” said Tony Cirone, principal at the accounting and consulting firm CironeFriedberg LLP. In places like Darien and New Canaan, he said, “some of those have been purchased sight unseen….. I do think we’re going to get some benefit from that.”

And speaking of those towns, the rebounding stock markets that avoided collapse will buffer the fall and boost the rise for Connecticut. What did the Dow Jones Industrial Average do Monday as recession headlines blared? Oh, nothing much, just a gain of 461 points, or 1.7 percent.

“The Fed is doing everything possible to prop up Wall Street and Main Street is another matter. This is the ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ Klepper-Smith wrote. “The small business sector in Connecticut will continue to suffer over the near-term.”

A weaker nation

Also Monday, the National Association for Business Economics issued a survey in which members forecast a decline of 5.6 percent in U.S. economic activity for 2020 — the largest drop since the U.S. demobilized after World War II, the Associated Press reported. But that’s all part of the COVID-19 response.

Carstensen sees a lasting problem in a weaker, more isolated United States, especially in the Pacific Rim, and that has nothing to do with coronavirus. Protests in the streets can’t help in the short run, but then, we don’t know where that’s going.

We know that many employees, many sectors, are eking their way back to normal as the summer starts — not just restaurants but plumbers, electricians and other construction trades, Cirone said, citing clients. Dentists, too, are coming back to work in large numbers.

And so we assume a middle path, as safe as any conclusion, with a very scary caveat.

“I think we’ll see a slow recovery,” Cirone said, “provided we don’t see another outbreak.”

Dreamstime / TNS The National Bureau of Economic Research said the economic expansion that started in June 2009 hit a peak in February before dropping sharply, marking the start of a recession.