The United States enters a technical recession with a 0.2% drop in GDP in the second quarter

July 28 () –

The United States entered a technical recession in the second quarter of 2022, when its gross domestic product (GDP) experienced a 0.2% drop, after having already contracted 0.4% in the first three months of the year, according to what appears of the first estimate of the data published this Thursday by the Office of Economic Analysis of the US Government (BEA, for its acronym in English).

Technical recession is called, according to the consensus of economists, the economic situation that occurs when two quarters of economic contraction are chained together.

The BEA has explained that between April and June there were decreases in private investment in inventories, in fixed residential investment, in government spending and in non-residential fixed investment. However, these setbacks were partially offset by a rise in exports and consumer spending.

The agency has also explained that the economic contraction in the second quarter occurred in a context of “continuous inflation”, low unemployment, rising interest rates and persistent problems in supply chains.

Due to this contraction, the GDP of the United States at the end of the second quarter of 2022 was 2.5% higher than that observed at the end of the fourth quarter of 2019, before any impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first quarter, this figure was 2.7% higher.

In pure annualized terms, the Bureau’s preferred way of presenting the data, US GDP contracted 0.9% in the second quarter of the year, compared with a 1.6% annualized decline in the first quarter.