Shortest Recession On Record -- Source -- July 20, 2021

The shortest recession on record:

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has declared that the economy exited the pandemic recession over a year ago. The semi-official arbiters of when recessions begin and end said on Monday that the recession that began in February of 2020 came to an end in April of 2020. That means the recession was already over before it was officially declared in June of last year.

By longstanding tradition, the beginning and end of recessions is decided by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the NBER, which is itself a private organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also by longstanding tradition, the committee's announcement of an end of a recession typically comes with a long and indeterminate lag. The last time around, it took until September of 2010 for the committee to recognize that the recession had ended in June of 2009.

The pandemic recession is now the shortest on record. It was so short that there is a good argument that it should not count as a recession at all. The traditional definition of a recession is “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months," which this one did not. The economy peaked in February, crashed in March, and began growing again in April. The NBER hasn't deigned to explain itself except to say the downturn was severe enough and widespread enough that it sure seemed like a recession.

One thing the NBER announcement does make clear is the fallaciousness of the widespread claims last year that Trump's alleged mismanagement of the pandemic response had hurt the U.S. economy. This was a constant refrain from the Biden campaign and the establishment media. Part of the explanation for the speedy recovery, entirely ignored by the establishment media's narrative, was that we created the recession by design by ordering businesses to shut their doors and people to stay home. And the other part was that the economy was doing so well going into the pandemic that it was able to snap back with incredible speed once the shackles of the initial lockdown were lifted.

– Alex Marlow & John Carney
Breitbart News Network