When the February unemployment figures are released on Thursday at 11.30am, there is a decent chance that, according to one measure, Australia will be in recession. But while it might not feel like the recessions of the 1980s or 1990s, it should serve as a warning to both the Reserve Bank and the government that the economy is extremely weak and does not need any more rate rises.

Whenever we have awful GDP growth like we saw in December, talk always turns to recessions, because of the old definition that a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

It’s not a particularly good definition and most journalists will now preface it as a “technical” recession.

Personally, I don’t care much about GDP growth because in my view the only thing that matters with recessions is jobs.

Did anyone think that the 1990s recession only began in 1991 when the June quarter that year showed GDP had fallen 0.2% off the back of a fall of 1.3% in the March quarter? I doubt it. More likely everyone twigged rather earlier, given in 1990 the unemployment rate went from 6.1% to 8%.

We don’t need to wait for GDP growth to know we are in a recession, and doing so can mean we wait too long to do anything good about it.

It’s why I prefer to use the US economist Claudia Sahm’s rule of recessions.

Her method looks at changes in unemployment rates.

Specifically, if the three-month average........

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