A History of American Recessions
10th August 2025
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, as Voronoi notes, the NBER looks backward, not at the present moment.
“Oh, yeah, looks like you’ve been shot. Sure sucks to be you.”