Tag Archives: business cycle

What Determines when a Recession is a Recession?

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June 18, 2020 — The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research declared on June 9 that US economic activity had peaked in February 2020, formally marking the start of the recession.

We all knew about the recession already and even the likely date when it started.  Looking at the numbers gave the same answer as “looking out the window.”  Measures of employment had fallen sharply from February to March.  Real personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and real personal income less transfers (which are  numbers that the NBER Committee looks at) both peaked sharply in February as well.  Official measures of GDP only exist on a quarterly basis; but the economic freefall in late March was enough to pull first-quarter GDP growth down to an annual rate of -4.8 %  (relative to the last quarter of 2019). Why did the NBER wait until now to declare something that had already been so clear? read more

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Tenth birthday of the June 2009 recovery

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June 17, 2019 — This month marks the 10th birthday of the US economic recovery.  June 2009  saw the “trough,” the end of the Great Recession of 2007-09. (As always, a declaration that the recession was over could as easily have been phrased less cheerfully as a declaration that the economy had hit “rock bottom.”)

Why such a long expansion?

Who or what deserves credit for the length of the expansion?

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The Fiscal Stimulus & Market Turnaround: 5-Year Anniversary

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Commentators are taking note of the five-year anniversary of the fiscal stimulus that President Obama enacted during his first month in office.   Those who don’t like Obama are still asking “if the  fiscal stimulus was so great, why didn’t it work?”    What is the appropriate response? read more

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