US economy on collision course for recession

Some economic pundits are forecasting a recession ahead for the US economy and it seems there may be little that could be done to prevent it.

According to Forbes, the most probable starting point is the fourth quarter of this year or early 2007 .

Slowly and methodically, the forces have been moving us toward an imminent recession. These cyclical forces include commodity inflation, which on a long-term basis is at the highest level since the 1970s. But they also extend deeper-- into the monetary forces and even consumer psychology behind the economic expansion.

A recession is traditionally defined in macroeconomics as a decline in a country's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more successive quarters of a year (equivalently, two consecutive quarters of negative real economic growth).

However this definition is not universally accepted. The US National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession more ambiguously as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months."