Pandemic recession ended in April 2020, shortest on record – KIRO 7 News Seattle

WASHINGTON – (AP) – It hit like a derailed train, was extremely destructive, but short-lived.

The recession that broke out with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic lasted only two months and officially ended in April 2020, making it the shortest downturn in history, according to the Economic Committee, which determines when recessions begin and end.

The US economy peaked in February 2020, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research said on Monday. The recession started the following month and ended in April.

According to NBER, the recession ended this month because that was when the economy bottomed out in terms of jobs and production. The end of the recession doesn’t mean the economy has fully recovered. It didn’t start to recover until May 2020, the committee said.

The upswing has continued uninterrupted over the past year and in some cases has almost come to an end. The production of goods and services in the economy is likely to have reached pre-pandemic levels in the April-June quarter, analysts estimate.

On July 29, the government will publish its first estimate of the gross domestic product of the economy – total production of goods and services – for the second quarter. That will confirm whether the economy as a whole has reached pre-pandemic levels.

The NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee consists of eight academic economists and is chaired by Robert Hall of Stanford. Other members include Robert Gordon from Northwestern University and Valerie Ramey from the University of California, San Diego.

While production has likely fully recovered, the economy still has 6.8 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic. The unemployment rate remains high at 5.9%, compared to 3.5% before the downturn, which was half a century deep.

The fact that production has likely fully recovered but employment has not raised concerns that companies have figured out how to produce goods and services with fewer people. Companies have increased their investments in machines, computers, and software, which could enable them to automate some work.

Nonetheless, employers are also desperately looking for new employees, and much of the vacancy could be closed in the coming months. Employers created 850,000 jobs in June, most of them in almost a year, and many economists predict the hiring will remain at that level in the coming months.

Employers cut more than 22 million jobs in March and April last year, the sharpest downsizing since World War II. But the setting was resumed in May.

Before that, the shortest recession lasted six months, from January to June 1980.

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