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The reason the government defines the recession as 4 months is because we did not see two quarters of GDP decline as much as we saw 4 months of it.

Shift the quarter to begin in Feb and you'd only have 1Q of decline.

That is why the 2 quarters rule is stupid and why 2020 doesn't fit the rule.

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It clearly does fit the rule because the year doesn't start in February. There's no need to change reality so you were right.

It's just a rule of thumb, not some profound maxim of economics.

The point is that if all the bad happened in half the quarter, that can make quite a difference, and the quarter start/end date is entirely arbitrary.

That said, you can apply the same to GP's suggestion of months, if the timescales are even shorter.

Yeah, the cutoff points for any rule of thumb are going to be fairly arbitrary. I don't understand why people are treating this like a profound observation.

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