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My googling seems to indicate; > All of the past 12 recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research have seen at least two quarters of negati
by zaroth 4y ago
My googling seems to indicate;
> All of the past 12 recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research have seen at least two quarters of negative GDP growth, and, conversely, each instance of at least two quarters of negative GDP growth has later been declared a recession.
Is this untrue? Perhaps, because some other sites list 14 recessions not 12… Then there’s also this;
> Over the past 75 years, there’s been a U.S. recession every time real GDP has fallen for two consecutive quarters (in Q2 1947 and Q3 1947, real GDP did decline without a recession).
> Over those 75 years there have also been two recessions without back-to-back declines in real GDP, namely the 1960-61 and 2001 recessions.
- generj 4y agoRight it’s a pretty good shortcut / shorthand for recessions, but no substitute for experts making a judgment call on multiple factors. The 2020 recession declared at the start of the COVID pandemic didn’t even last one quarter. Per your source, 2001 wasn’t consecutive quarterly drops in GDP but NBER prefers monthly stats over quarterly anyways. This means of the four recessions in my lifetime (1990,2001,2007) 2 out of 4 (2021 and 2001) don’t align with the shorthand of two quarters of consecutive negative growth.
- generj 4y agoPerhaps, because some other sites list 14 recessions not 12… It really really depends on when you start counting. https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansions-and-contractions https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansi... NBER has actually determined 35 recessions, most of them retroactively (as far back as they had reasonable data into 1854). They started the current committee in 1978, so it has only been around for six “business cycle contractions.” NBER has existed since 1920, but didn’t start doing business cycle work until 1929 (pretty easy to call that one as a recession). That’s 15 recessions, perhaps the source claiming 14 was during/before the Feb 2020 recession?