Given the size and economic importance of the US, the world is watching where the US economy is going. It peaked--and the 1990s boom came to an end--around March 2001, when America's remarkable economic expansion gave way to the first recession in ten years. But did that recession end when output started to grow in December 2001? Or is it still continuing? The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and its Business Cycle Dating Committee, the semi-official arbiter and tracker of the US business cycle, remain silent. Recent economic and monetary policy changes have exposed a crucial ambiguity that had always been implicit in the way the NBER thought about business cycles.
Given the size and economic importance of the US, the world is watching where the US economy is going. It peaked--and the 1990s boom came to an end--around March 2001, when America's remarkable economic expansion gave way to the first recession in ten years. But did that recession end when output started to grow in December 2001? Or is it still continuing? The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and its Business Cycle Dating Committee, the semi-official arbiter and tracker of the US business cycle, remain silent. Recent economic and monetary policy changes have exposed a crucial ambiguity that had always been implicit in the way the NBER thought about business cycles.