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 April 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 19 months in November.
