Zarnowitz has been studying business cycles for 50 years. His memory is a database of details.
"The first of the '80s recessions had only one quarter of GDP decline," subsequently revised to reflect two back-to-back negative quarters, Zarnowitz says.
Don't expect any GDP revisions -- up or down -- to influence the dating committee's assessment. To avoid any revisions, the committee asks "itself hypothetically what decision it would make if a turnaround in the economy started just after the most recently observed data," the NBER said in its Nov. 26 press release.
The dating of business cycles has been a function of management by this committee since 1980. Prior to that, the dating of cycle peaks and troughs was "the byproduct of work on business cycles by [Arthur] Burns and [Geoffrey] Moore," Zarnowitz says, the other giants of the business cycle along with Wesley Mitchell.
The NBER dating committee has often been regarded as irrelevant for calling cycle peaks/troughs long after the economy has bottomed/peaked. The July 1990 peak, for example, was announced in April 1991, one month following the March 1991 trough, which was announced in December 1992. That criticism misses the whole point of the NBER's mission.
"We're so slow because we want to avoid recessions," Zarnowitz says. "That explains the long lag. We're a fact-finding commission. We're not trying to predict."
The data for the current recession may yet be revised. The dating of the cycle peak is apparently fixed in stone.
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