November 2001 and the beginning of a recession. The expansion

November 2001 and the beginning of a recession. The expansion lasted 73 months; the previous expansion of the 1990s lasted 120 months.
What took the committee so long? I m pretty sure it had nothing to do with any disagreement over whether we re in a recession. It was all about picking the right starting date. On Friday, the committee s seven members (an eighth, Christina Romer, quit last Tuesday after President-elect Obama picked her to be chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers) had a conference call and decided on December 2007. As the committee s chairman, Stanford economics professor Robert Hall, told me almost exactly a year ago:
We don t usually have a conference call until we are quite convinced that a turning point has occurred. Thus the subject of the call is not whether the recession has begun or ended, but rather when that event occurred. Consequently, the call occurs long after it is generally recognized that a turning point has occurred. There is usually a period of 6 months or so when the financial press excoriates us for Toyota Intelligent Tester 2 v2011 tardy action.
There have not yet been two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, a metric often bandied about in the press as the definition of a recession. So the business cycle committee went to some lengths to explain itself:
The committee believes that the two most reliable comprehensive estimates of aggregate domestic production are normally the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Product and the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Income, both produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In concept, KESS OBD TURNING KIT the two should be the same, because sales of products generate income for producers and workers equal to the value of the sales. However, because the measurement on the product and income sides proceeds somewhat independently, the two actual measures differ by a statistical discrepancy. The product-side estimates fell slightly in 2007Q4, rose slightly in 2008Q1, rose again in 2008Q2, and fell slightly in 2008Q3. The income-side estimates reached their