The White House is sure the economy is not in a recession nor headed for one. Wall Street is pretty sure there is no recession now, but isn’t as positive about what’s ahead.Looking at the data, the picture is indeed nuanced. Nothing right now is screaming recession, though there is plenty of chatter. The jobs market is still pretty good, manufacturing is weakening but still expanding, and consumers still seem fairly flush with cash, if somewhat less willing to part with it these days.So with second-quarter GDP data due out Thursday, the question of whether the economy is merely in a natural slowdown after a robust year in 2021 or in a steeper downturn that could have extended repercussions, will be on everyone’s mind.“This is not an economy that’s in recession, but we’re in a period of transition in which growth is slowing,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “A recession is a broad-based contraction that affects many sectors of the economy. We just don’t have that.”On Monday, Kevin Hassett, head of the National Economic Council during the Trump administration, pushed back on that view, and said the White House was making a mistake by not owning up to the realities of the moment.“We’re ... kind of in recession, right? So it’s a difficult time,” Hassett, who is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin during a live “Squawk Box” interview.“In this case, if I were in the White House I would not be out there sort of denying it’s a recession,” he added.Two negative quartersIf nothing else, the economy stands at least a fair a chance of hitting the rule-of-thumb recession definition of two consecutive quarters with negative GDP readings. The first quarter saw a gross domestic product decline of 1.6% and an Atlanta Federal Reserve gauge is indicating the second quarter is on pace to hit the same number.Wall Street, though, is seeing things a little differently. Though multiple economists, including those at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and Nomura, see a recession in the future, the consensus GDP forecast for the second quarter is a gain of 1%, according to Dow Jones.Whether the U.S. skirts recession will mostly rest in the hands of consumers, who accounted for 68% of all economic activity in the first quarter.Recent indications, however, are that spending retreated in the April-to-June period. Real (after-inflation) personal consumption expenditures declined 0.1% in May after increasing just 0.2% in the first quarter. In fact, real spending fell in three of the first five months this year, a product of inflation running at its hottest pace in more than 40 years.cnbc.com