Where Data Tells the Story
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Alternate title: There used to be more recessions.
Here's a bit more on this chart:
The official designation of a recession comes from a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization. The committee considers a wide range of economy-wide, monthly data points, but the NBER views GDP as “the single best measure.” The committee calls a recession once there is a significant decline across these measures for more than a few months.
The NBER’s official designation of a recession, then, doesn’t happen until there are several months of data, allowing it to be sure both that a recession happened and when exactly it started. In other words, the NBER looks backward, not at the present moment.
Using this measure, here's a few insights: