In case you weren't clued in by 10 consecutive months of job losses or the recent disclosure that economic output declined last summer, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced Monday that the country has been in recession for a year.
Calling a Maryland recession isn't so easy. This state is in relatively good shape and has avoided the economy-wide slumps in other regions. But car dealers, real estate agents and tax collectors can tell you that this feels like a bad recession to them. And they might prove to be prophetic.
Maryland will be a better place to work or run a business than most places next year, but it will have a hard time dodging the employment declines and other broad reversals afflicting the nation as a whole.
"We are a little bit insulated but not 100 percent immune to a national economic downturn," says Daraius Irani, director of applied economics at RESI, Towson University's consulting wing.
"We're probably going to see some negative numbers. It's going to get worse before it gets better. I don't think anybody has seen a bottom yet."
While the nation has shed more than a million jobs this year - a loss of nearly 1 percent - Maryland employment has grown slightly, with 11,000 more jobs in October than at the beginning of the year. (That's an increase of about 0.4 percent.)
Contrast that with Florida, which has lost 160,000 jobs this year, or 2 percent. Even states that haven't been hammered by housing meltdowns, such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are losing employment.
As usual, the medical industry and the huge enterprise called the U.S. government are helping to keep Maryland afloat.
Thanks to an aging, sicker population, big construction projects and delivering care to out-of-staters, medical institutions have contributed well over half of Maryland's job growth this year, even though they make up a much smaller portion of the overall economy.
Federal spending probably accounts for the rest. The government isn't increasing Maryland spending by tens of billions of dollars the way it did after the 2001 terrorist attacks and the Iraq invasion.
But homeland security and war dollars, bumped by base realignment that is adding to Maryland's defense jobs, continue to pour in.
Government contracting and health care are bright spots for the Baltimore office of Robert Half International, which helps companies fill positions for accountants and financial managers.
