Note: The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the acknowledged arbiter of business-cycle dating, describes a recession as “the period between a peak of economic activity and its subsequent trough, or lowest point…involv[ing] a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” An expansion is the period from a trough to its subsequent peak or highest point.
The Committee announced on June 8, 2020, that the economic expansion following the trough in June 2009 peaked in February 2020. On July 19, 2021, it announced that the trough of the ensuing recession was in April 2020. While the recession was very deep, it was the shortest on record at just two months. The committee noted that this recession “had different characteristics and dynamics than prior recessions” but nonetheless the unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the economy, warranted the designation of this episode as a recession, even though the downturn was briefer than earlier contractions. On a quarterly basis the NBER dated the previous peak as the fourth quarter of 2019 and the latest trough as the second quarter of 2020.
When President Trump took office in January 2017, he inherited an economy in its 91st month of economic expansion following the end of the Great Recession in June 2009. That expansion continued into 2020, becoming the longest on record but peaked at 128 months in February 2020. The current expansion, which began following the April 2020 trough, reached 24 months in April.
While the post-Great Recession expansion was long, both the economy’s average annual growth rate and the typical worker’s earnings gains were relatively modest by the standards of earlier long expansions. Former President Trump claimed that his policies would produce a substantial and sustained increase in economic growth, and his Council of Economic Advisers claimed that those policies would boost wages and employment substantially. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and many other non-partisan analysts projected much slower economic growth and smaller increases in most workers’ earnings.
This chart book documents the 2009-2020 economic expansion and will continue to track the evolution of the economy. It supplants its predecessor, “The Legacy of the Great Recession,” which covers the decade from the start of the recession in December 2007 through December 2017 with a focus on the plunge into and recovery from the Great Recession.
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+2/-0 TheCrow 5/24/2022 1:23:34 PM