There’s No US Recession Until an Obscure Panel of ‘Eggheads’ Says It Is So

The title (which is original to bloomberg) is actually a little odd but telling. The piece is a not too bad explanation of how NBER considers things and discusses how they see things currently. In a less flame-y period, this would almost be a PSA or "the more you know."

On the "Recession" word, they point out a few contra-indicators of a recession and add this quote:

    What Bloomberg Economics Says...

    “The committee’s current methodology is sound. Q1’s contraction is mainly due to strong imports (due to strong demand) after slowdown inventory building due to combination of supply bottlenecks and gangbuster inventory building in Q4 last year. It’s hard to interpret that as a weakness-driven contraction.”

    -- Anna Wong, chief US economist

Having said that, economics is the profession of "on the other hand" since it deals with large aggregates of human activity and humans are complex and form complicated structures. There would always be bright spots to point at against a thing. I'm personally more on the lookout for things like large tranches of debt suddenly being defaulted upon and forcing downward revisions. So far, I haven't seen that.

the bar has to be set high or else recessions would be more common and would not signify anything that abnormal

That seems like it would have a Liberal Bias.