A mild recession is not worth commenting about.

Right! Mild as we were told the house price adjusted would be mild.

End the Iraq war and add 10,000,000 unemployed too.

New York Times, By Sheryl Gay Stolberg & David M Harszenhorn, January 8

CHICAGO — President Bush, in a marked shift from his usual upbeat economic assessments, conceded here on Monday that the nation faces “economic challenges” due to rising oil prices, the home mortgage crisis and a weakening job market.

“We cannot take growth for granted,” Mr. Bush said in a speech to a group of business leaders in which he acknowledged that “recent economic indicators have become increasingly mixed.”

But even after a government report on Friday that showed unemployment jumped to 5 percent last month from 4.7 percent in November, Mr. Bush stopped short of warning that the nation may be about to enter a recession.

Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail echoed the president’s sobering view. With a number of analysts now predicting that an economic downturn could be imminent, both Mr. Bush and Congressional Democratic leaders say they are considering whether a rescue package is necessary to counter the threat of a recession, in which economic activity declines and joblessness increases over an extended period of time.

[...]

Still, the White House is not convinced it must act. The deliberations are tightly held, and aides to Mr. Bush say he will not make a decision about whether to offer a stimulus package, or what it should contain, until later this month, in time for his State of the Union address scheduled for Jan. 28. Appearing in New York on Monday, Mr. Bush’s Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., echoed that approach, and cautioned against any rush to action.

“Working through the current situation and getting the policy right,” Mr. Paulson said, “is more important than getting the policy announced quickly.”

On Capitol Hill, Democrats were positioning themselves to get ahead of any proposal the White House might present. Aides to Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, said that she had yet to conclude decisively that a stimulus package was needed, but that she had met with a group of economic advisers last month who urged her to take swift action aimed at stabilizing the jittery economy and lifting consumer confidence.

The group included Lawrence H. Summers, a Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton; Felix G. Rohatyn, the financier and former ambassador to France; and Laurence D. Fink, the chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, the global investment firm.

An aide to Ms. Pelosi said the three were “unanimous in saying that we should move out ahead." In an interview over the weekend, Mr. Summers said he believed that there was now a greater than 50 percent chance of a recession this year.

“My view is that now is the time to be thinking about policies that would provide recession insurance,” Mr. Summers said, “and if we wait until it’s entirely clear that there is a recession, it will be too late.”