Washington, (Asian independent) A new report has revealed that the 2020 US recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic last two months, making it the shortest on record in the country.
“The committee has determined that a trough in monthly economic activity occurred in the US economy in April 2020. The previous peak in economic activity occurred in February 2020. The recession lasted two months,” the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) said in the report released on Monday.
The committee concluded that the unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warranted the designation of this episode as a recession, even though the downturn was briefer than earlier contractions, Xinhua news agency quoted the NBER as saying.
It also decided that any future downturn of the economy would be a new recession and not a continuation of the recession associated with the February 2020 peak, according to the NBER.
Analysts often refer to recessions as two consecutive quarters of contraction in gross domestic product (GDP).
However, in the US, the NBER formally determines when recessions begin and end on a range of factors.
Jason Furman, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on Monday that the NBER’s formal decision means the US economy started getting less bad after April 2020, but, in many respects, it’s still well below where it should be.
The US economy contracted 3.5 per cent in 2020 amid the pandemic, the largest annual GDP decline since 1946, according to the Commerce Department.