NBER declares 2020 recession dates

The National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) has announced official start dates for the 2020 US recession. It is very rare for such quick pronouncements (they are normally made 9-12 months after the fact) but the fact that 90% of the economy came to a sudden halt, has led to such deep declines in their metrics that they could make an early pronunciation without risk of being proven wrong later.

The monthly economic peak was declared as February 2020 (first month of recession is March 2020), while the quarterly peak occurred in 2019Q4 (first quarter of recession is 2020Q1).

Note that most of the media and press is interpreting this incorrectly, saying the US entered recession in February 2020. This is of course not true, the economy made a peak in February (its best showing this business cycle) and fell into recession in March (March was first month of contraction).

The NBER declarations are consistent with the dates we have been using in all our charts/reports since mid-April already.

Our first proclamation was made in the 17 April 2020 weekly SuperIndex PDF report and has remained unchanged since it first appeared, namely:

Since this date you would have noticed all NBER recession shading in reports and charts to have commenced in March for monthly frequencies and 1Q2020 for quarterly frequencies.

You can read the NBER declaration over here

We are estimating the economy to trough in May or June, but more on that later.

About RecessionALERT

Dwaine has a Bachelor of Science (BSc Hons) university degree majoring in computer science, math & statistics and is a full-time trader and investor. His passion for numbers and keen research & analytic ability has helped grow RecessionALERT into a company used by hundreds of hedge funds, brokerage firms and financial advisers around the world.

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