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Saul Eslake

This could be the recession we did not have to have

Federal and state governments have chosen policies which allowed the virus to spread - and which clash oddly with their usual fixations on public security.

Saul EslakeContributor
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Last month, the US National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee formally determined that the US recession that began in March 2020 ended just a month later – making it the shortest of the 35 recessions that the US has experienced since 1854.

This determination underscores the fact that, at least in the US, it has never been a necessary or sufficient condition for identifying a recession that there be two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth in real GDP.

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Saul Eslake is former chief economist of ANZ Bank and of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Australia, and is now principal of Corinna Economic Advisory based in Hobart.

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    Original URL: https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/this-could-be-the-recession-we-did-not-have-to-have-20210815-p58iv3