GDP Contracts 0.5%, "Worst Fall in 7 Years"

The Commerce Department announced the gross domestic product shrank at a 0.5% rate between July and September. The AP reports, "That was weaker than the 0.3 percent rate of decline first estimated a month ago, and marked the worst showing since the economy contracted at a 1.4 percent pace in the third quarter of 2001, when the nation was suffering through its last recession." Americans cut their spending at a 3.7%, a higher rate than initially reported (and the highest rate since 1980) and the AP adds the data is "further evidence that the country is almost certainly in the throes of a painful recession." Almost certainly? Isn't the writing on the wall that we are in one? Graphic from a State Department publication about the U.S. economy