It's not official. Only the National Board of Economic Research says when the US economy had dropped into a recession. And the final numbers for the second quarter aren't here yet.

But the economy seems so increasingly troublesome that the Atlanta Federal Reserve's GDPNow tracker—a blow-by-blow estimate of where the economy is on any given day—can't keep up. On Thursday, it ran an estimate alert, popping up on the phones of economic geeks all over the country, that GDP was going to contract by 1% in the second quarter. While no guarantee, it's a strong suggestion that there's already a recession going on.

Then, on Friday morning, there was another alert. That -1% dropped to -2.1%. As the Atlanta Fed wrote, "After this morning's Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute for Supply Management and the construction report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcasts of second quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from 1.7 percent and -13.2 percent, respectively, to 0.8 percent and -15.2 percent, respectively."