That was going 4 miles down the road and made 16 trips per truck per day. So can you imagine how much it cost to get groceries to the store. I think they the oil companies should be slapped with a windfall profit tax, cause whoever heard of an oil company making 15 billion dollar profit for the quarter, every quarter. That was made off of everybody that owns a car or truck or big truck. If you wanted to work, you had to buy gas. Bush is going out of office and gas has dropped over 3.50 since July. Bush owns his own oil company and his own oil wells. That should be self explanatory where all that money went and who had their hand out to get their share of the profits. He had the power to make them drop the cost of gas, but that would have been taking money out of Bush's pocket. Diesel fuel should be 50 cents a gallon. It went to 4.99 gallon here in WV. Some places here it went to 5.15 gallon. It is the first thing to come off of crude to make gas. When gas was going up, and it was below 40 dollars a barrel what it is now, it was 1.29 gallon, here it is 1.69 to 1.89. They are saying the oil companies made their money on the way up and the service station owners are making theirs on the way down. I knew this was coming in 2007, I made 445,000.00 last year. And made that in 11 months. Sounds like I should be rich or at least have money in the bank, when my contract ended last October, I owed nobody nothing, paid for everything with cash, check, or debit card, didnt owe anybody anything and didnt have any money either. Hope next year is better than this one. Cant get any worse. But when Obama gets in, things will change, will just take time.

Mr. Gilchrist,

Our methodology aims at warning about a recession somewhat ahead of time, while the information can still be usefully employed in adjusting one's plans for a coming downturn. Therefore, I would consider warning about a recession 8 months in advance of its "official start date" to be quite good an outcome.
You bring up a valid point that there is a difference between warning that a recession is imminent and asserting that the recession has already started. We did say, in the Research Reports issue from July 7, 2008, that our analysis suggests business contraction has begun (at that point the analysis was based on the available data, which only provided information though May of 2008). Thus, we did “call the recession” in early July, while NBER made their determination only this week.
No forecasting procedure is perfect, and ours is not an exception. It would be great to find a procedure that allowed us to predict the business cycle turns more precisely than we currently can, but we have not found one yet. Our current methodology is better at warning about an imminent recession that at timing the date of the downturn exactly. Our hope is that this information is still useful to our reader.

Respectfully,
Polina Vlasenko