All signs point to recession

Lots of empty houses and "for sale" signs. Lost jobs. Shrinking paychecks and nest eggs. Could the country already be in a recession? An Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that 61 percent of the public thinks so.

That shrinking feeling: Some experts, like the majority of people questioned in the poll, say the economy actually may be shrinking. The worry is that consumers and businesses will hunker down further and pull back spending, throwing the economy into a tailspin.

"Absolutely, we're in a recession," said Hilda Sanchez, 44, of Waterford, Calif. Squeezed by high energy and food bills, "we can't afford the things that we normally buy," she said.

Poor 2007: For all of 2007, the economy grew by only 2.2 percent. That was the weakest performance since 2002, when the country was struggling to recover from the last recession.

Housing: The housing collapse was the biggest culprit in 2007. Builders lowered spending on housing projects by 16.9 percent on an annualized basis, the most in 25 years.

Nanette Dahlin, 52, of St. Louis Park called the situation "very scary." She said friends in Madison, Minn., put their house up for sale recently and reduced the asking price more than $100,000 in only a week. "They are in bad shape," Dahlin said.

Jobs: The job market is faltering -- a point driven home by a report showing that employers cut jobs in January for the first time in more than four years.

Shrinking paychecks: A cooling job market along with high energy and food prices are taking a toll on paychecks. Workers' average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, fell 0.9 percent last year.

Definitions: By one rough rule of thumb, a recession occurs when there are two consecutive quarters -- six straight months -- when the economy shrinks.

That did not happen in the last recession, though. The economy contracted in the first quarter of 2001, turned positive in the second quarter, shrank in the third quarter and turned up again in the final quarter of that year.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the recognized arbiters for dating recessions, uses a more complicated formula.

By its measure, the last recession was in 2001, starting in March and ending in November.

Poll facts: The poll was based on the responses from 1,006 adults surveyed Monday through Wednesday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

ASSOCIATED PRESS