Is this truly a recession?

In the past few months, many people have been saying the country is in a recession. I wanted to know what truly defines a recession and if the United States is in one. According to www.investorwords.com a recession is a period of general economic decline; specifically, a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters. I didn't know if this had occured, so I thought, let me check and see what others have said about this topic. I went to Wikipedia and this is what I discovered:

"A recession is a contraction phase of the business cycle. In the USA, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines it more broadly as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[1] Newspapers often quote the rule of thumb that a recession occurs when real gross domestic product (GDP) growth is negative for two or more consecutive quarters. However, not only is this a flawed measure that fails to register several official (NBER defined) US recessions, the quotation has been taken out of context from a 1974 New York Times article that listed a number of rules of thumb, the rest of which have been ignored [2]. A sustained recession may become a depression."

Now having read that, I still didn't know if we were in a recession. One of the main reasons for this is many experts often don't agree upon an universal definition of what a recession truly is. If you asked some economist about a recession and depression, some of them may be confused or give very different answers. Based upon the first definition I provided, it is very difficult to actually determine when this "recession" began or ends.

According to the second definition, the NBER uses various factors to determine if the country is in a recession. These factors include wholesale retail sales, employment, real income and industrial production. Sidebar: What is fake income? The NBER also considers when business activity has reached its peak and starts to fall until the time when business activity bottoms out. When business activity starts to peak again it's called an expansionary period. According to this concept/definition, the average recession lasts a year.

After reading that, I can now see how the "experts" can/will disagree on what a recession truly is. I'm leaning more towards the experts who believe a recession is close to a depression. I don't think we have truly entered a recession. I believe some indicators will be the inability to do some of the most basic things that might be taken for granted. For example, maybe you would shop at a huge super/discount store and buy household items in bulk, when you are unable to purchase a large quantity of necessities and you have to cut back, we are in a recession. I beg to differ that the United States is in a recession because so many people spent a lot of money to see the movie Dark Knight. How can the economy be in a recession when this movie was in the number one spot for weeks?

I guess it goes back to the amount of disposable income one has to spend and if one person has $100 in disposable income and another has $1000, the person with the $1000 might not think things are bad.