Given how rarely Consumer Credit contracts in U.S. history, and its central importance to our highly-leveraged, consumption-based economy, personal credit trends are a useful gauge of a Depression's momentum.  

Economic production data, like Gross Domestic Product, may be unsustainably manipulated via deficit-financed, Government spending.  It is the observation of this forum that, given the arbitrary definition of a "technical recession" employed by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. need never again experience one simply by engineering GDP growth every other quarter.  Perpetual pretend prosperity brought to you through the magic of debt accumulation! 

This sort of intellectually vacant, accounting tomfoolery is currently under scrutiny amongst public companies that have engaged in "window dressing" to obscure their actual financial condition.  But the same kind of financial shenanigans (deficit-financed GDP gains) is used by the NBER to definitively quantify a recession's duration regardless of more important trends such as unemployment, credit and undistorted economic activity.    

The following charts illustrate current Consumer Credit trends in a historical context.