When people ask me if I think we will have a double-dip recession I always answer no. A double dip would mean that we have had a recovery and then slipped back into the red. And we haven’t. Anyone who looks at the job figures (or … better yet … is part of the unemployed statistical pool) knows that we are just bouncing along the bottom, not rising and falling.

Yes, I know that the stock market recovered pretty well (before it tanked and recovered and … well, you know). And yes, national output has risen, which is the technical definition of a recovery.

But I am not convinced. It seems to me that output fell so fast and far because retailers and consumers decided to draw down their inventories. Eventually the shelves were bare and so they reordered, causing industrial production to pick up. But now the shelves are restocked and orders have dried up again. That’s what bouncing along the bottom looks like today.

Yes, I know that this is not the whole story. But the rest of the story isn’t so different. It’s a single dipper so far and that’s not a good thing.

Martin’s Wolf’s column in yesterday’s Financial Times comes to the same conclusion, but backs it up with more analysis. It is required reading. Here’s a telling excerpt. Click on the link to read the entire essay.

“Many ask whether high-income countries are at risk of a “double dip” recession. My answer is: no, because the first one did not end. The question is, rather, how much deeper and longer this recession or “contraction” might become. The point is that, by the second quarter of 2011, none of the six largest high-income economies had surpassed output levels reached before the crisis hit, in 2008 (see chart). The US and Germany are close to their starting points, with France a little way behind. The UK, Italy and Japan are languishing far behind.

“The authoritative National Bureau of Economic Research of the US does define a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months”. This is to focus on the change in output, rather than its level. Normally, that makes sense. But this recession is not normal. When economies suffer such steep collapses, as they did during the worst of the crisis (the peak to trough fall in gross domestic product having varied between 3.9 per cent in France and 9.9 per cent in Japan), an expansion that fails to return output to the starting point will not feel like recovery. This is especially true if unemployment remains high, employment low and spare capacity elevated. In the US, unemployment is still double its pre-crisis rates.”