U.S. recession ended in April 2020, making it shortest on record

Reuters reports that the U.S. Business Cycle Dating Committee announced that the U.S. recession touched off by the coronavirus lasted only two months, ending with a low point reached in April 2020 after the start of a sharp drop in economic activity in March of that year.

The committee said that while the country had by no means gotten back to normal operating capacity at that point, indicators of both jobs and production "point clearly to April 2020 as the month of the trough," with a rebound beginning in May.

Indeed, the resumption of growth was so rapid the committee said it was only "the unprecedented magnitude of the decline" that led members to consider what happened to be a recession in the first place, with a downturn typically requiring "depth, duration and diffusion" to qualify for the label.

The designation of the recession's end date is of historical note, but also relevant to research on the dynamics of business cycles and, in this case, into how that historic policy response played out.

The announcement makes the pandemic recession by far the shortest on record, at two months only a third as long as the six-month downturn at the start of 1980, and a fourth as long as the recession that followed the collapse of the tech bubble in 2001.