It's Too Soon to Pinpoint Recession's End

It's Too Soon to Pinpoint Recession's End Most members of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee have said the recession probably ended in mid-2009, when several key economic indicators reached their trough and the economy started growing again.

But the seven-member group said Monday that it wasn't ready to mark the official end date, given the chance—however small—that the economy could start shrinking again or that revised data could shift the timing of the economy's low point.

"Although most indicators have turned up, the committee decided that the determination of the trough date on the basis of current data would be premature," the committee said in a statement. "Many indicators are quite preliminary at this time and will be revised in coming months."

The decision bred controversy on the committee, underscoring the range of opinions about the state of the U.S. economy in the wake of the deepest recession in decades.

Delaying a declaration of the recession's end "raises unnecessary questions about the health of the economy—that the whole committee wouldn't think the recovery is strong enough to be able to say that it's a recovery," said committee member and Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon. "We're not going to know anything different sixth months from now other than we didn't have a meteorite fall on the U.S," he said.

The dating panel, part of the nonprofit, nonpartisan research group, relies on a number of indicators to determine recession dates. They include gross domestic product, a measure of all the money spent on goods and services; gross domestic income, a measure of the income received by households, companies and others; job creation; industrial production and retail sales. All reached a trough last year but haven't returned to prerecession levels.