Recession and the SPFMI

A multitude of articles out there in cyber-space are dedicated to figuring out whether or not the U.S. economy is now in recession. A recession, generally speaking, is when an economy is contracting instead of expanding—expansion, by the way, is crucial when using fiat money like Federal Reserve Notes, because when your money is based on debt that can’t be repaid, nasty things happen.

I understand that my definition of a recession is not nearly complicated enough for economists and other finance professionals; it’s entirely too concise, and arrives at the point much too easily. If you require something a little more vague, here’s a heap of contradicting definitions from google.

Seeing as how I am not a professional economist, I am not even going to attempt to argue this point with charts, graphs, and historical data. This is not to say that I can’t whip up some mean charts, graphs, and data, because while I may not be an economist, I am a beast of a programmer, and frankly my spreadsheets rock. I am instead going to prove my point using a new-fangled proprietary analysis algorithm that I like to call:

The Successful Person’s Family Misery Index (The SPFMI)

The SPFMI is based on the following, highly scientific, premise:

The Players:

• Group A: In every family, there are a few responsible, self-sufficient people. These people work hard, spend wisely, and generally have their affairs in order. When they encounter a problem, they do what they need to do and take care of business without so much as a whimper. They’re also known as “The Grown-Ups,” regardless of age.
• Group B: Every family also has many people that seem to always have better things to do with their time than keep their lives in order. They also seem to have no problem reminding the members of Group A that it is somehow their responsibility to deal with all of their personal and financial problems. They’re known by many names, but this is a family blog, so I’ll leave them out.

The Math:
The predation upon Group A by Group B increases or decreases in direct correlation with the relative strength of the economy.

Or, to put it in layman’s terms:
The more the economy heads south, the more all of the relatives you haven’t heard from since Thanksgiving are going to call to complain and hit you up for money.

There is probably some sort of formula in which the amount of time you spend on the phone listening to other people’s problems is multiplied by the number of checks you write (divided by feelings of guilt, of course), but I haven’t quite cracked it yet. I can tell you that according to my SPFMI, we are definitely in a recession, and it’s looking like it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better!