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.
Using this measure, here’s a few insights:
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From 1855 to 2020, recessions lasted an average of 17 months. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the average recession has decreased to 14 months.
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The US’ longest recession lasted 65 months from October 1873 to March 1879
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The US has gone through 13 recessions since WWII
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The longest recession since WWII was the Great Recession
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The shortest US recession was during COVID-19, from February to April 2020
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Although economic struggles and the Great Depression marked the 1930s, the NBER-defined recession lasted from September 1929 to March 1933.
In other words… there used to be more ‘official’ recessions.