If nonfarm employment can be relied on as an indicator, then the U.S. is already in a recession.
Even a cursory glance at this employment graph (click for larger version) generated at the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED2 web site using data they obtained from the Current Employment Statistics survey speaks volumes.
The U.S. population is rising at around 1% but the number of American jobs is no longer growing. Moreover we appear on track for July 2008 to show our first year-over-year decline in employment since America pulled out of the 2001 recession.
It’s this actual decline in non-farm payroll numbers that has marked every official U.S. recession since 1940. We’re not quite there yet— June 2008 showed a 0.01% (one-hundredth of one percent) increase in jobs.