America’s roaring recovery might carry lessons for future recessions

COMMITTEE OFA eight prominent economists made it official on July 19th. The covid-19 recession, America’s deepest since the Depression, was also its shortest, spanning just March and April 2020. That tests the very definition of a recession, which the National Bureau of Economic Research describes as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months”. A recession it was judged nonetheless, given its breadth and extraordinary depth. The plunge in output in the second quarter of 2020 was more than three times the second-largest quarterly drop in America’s post-war history.