Eighteen hours later—on Thursday morning, as the markets will still be digesting the Fed’s move—the Commerce Department will publish its first estimate of U.S. gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2022. There’s more uncertainty around this number, but there’s a good chance it will show that the economy essentially stalled in the first half of this year.

The timing will be miserably co-incident, a rare moment in economic history, the economist’s equivalent of a solar eclipse: higher inflation, higher interest rates, slumping economic output.

The political peril for President Biden and the Democrats is so obvious that the White House is already out doing aggressive damage control. Their message is a familiar one, denial—only this time, twice over: This is not a recession. And inflation is not our fault.

The first claim is no more than conjecture. The second is bogus.

Private-sector economists’ estimates of Thursday’s second-quarter GDP growth number vary but not by much. Recent surveys of Wall Street economists suggest they are looking for an annualized rate between zero and 1%. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which produces estimates of quarterly GDP growth in something like real time, currently estimates that the number was minus 1.6%.

The reason there is heightened interest is that if the Atlanta Fed is right, it will mark the second consecutive quarter of negative growth, traditionally the definition of a recession.

The White House is working hard to pre-debunk the idea that a negative growth number will mean the U.S. is in recession. In an unusual statement late last week its economists noted: “While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.”

As it happens, the president’s economists are right. The origin of the idea that a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of declining output is unclear. My favorite theory is that, in a neat bit of political symmetry for today, the definition was invented by President

Lyndon B. Johnson’s

advisers to prove that after a bad run of economic news, the U.S. wasn’t in a recession.

The nearest thing the U.S. has to an official declaration of a recession is the result of deliberations by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The NBER’s Dating Committee is not a matchmaking project for lonely-heart macroeconomists. It’s a bipartisan group of leading researchers who pore over data to determine turning points in economic cycles. Fortunately for the White House, this is a lengthy process—initial data are frequently revised and updated. It typically takes the NBER a year or so from the onset of a recession to tell us that we have had one.

In 2000 it took the NBER 15 months to declare a recession, by which time the downturn was long over. This is like being told by a doctor that you are officially sick a year after your funeral.

As the White House notes, the NBER examines monthly data for a range of economic variables and doesn’t rely on the broad-based GDP number. That makes particular sense now. The post-pandemic economy is behaving strangely. While output is flat or declining, employment continues to grow strongly. (Even that could be a problem. It implies a sharp drop in labor productivity, not good for the economy’s productive potential.)

So we should indeed be careful in overinterpreting one set of quarterly GDP figures.

Which is why even if the GDP number on Thursday turns out to be positive, it doesn’t let the White House off the hook.

For one thing, the first half of this year was still flat at best. But more important, the economy is battling the headwind of accelerating inflation. We are only in the early stages of a monetary tightening whose effects haven’t even begun to be felt yet—the results will start to appear in the second half of this year. We don’t need an official committee of economists to tell us that inflation has been fueled by the reckless boost to domestic demand the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress gave it last year.

In all likelihood, Stagflation Day will be just the start.