Cheat Sheet

No more back and forth about whether we’re in a recession: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, we’ve already been in one for a year. The nonpartisan group’s Business Cycle Dating Committee released a statement today saying the US economy entered a recession in December 2007, and the news sparked a sharp selloff on Wall Street. The Dow dropped 679.95 points to close at 8,149.09, while the S&P and Nasdaq were off almost 9 percent. GE and Caterpillar both lost more than 6 percent after a report that manufacturing contracted at the fastest pace in 26 years, while AmEx and JPMorgan Chase dropped more than 9 percent on news that credit card companies would cut available lending by 45 percent. “The economic news is going to continue to get worse before it gets better,” Leo Grohowski of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. told Bloomberg Radio. “The biggest single challenge in terms of the economy is the state of housing and it still remains precarious.”