ALL THE NUMBERS ARE STILL PRELIMINARY:

Australia and most other countries date their economic expansions using the rule that defines a recession as two or more consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. The US is almost alone in using a less mechanical process that includes employment and a variety of other economic indicators, in addition to the core criterion of GDP. (Japan's government also departs from the automatic two-quarter rule and considers other indicators.)

Troughs and peaks in the US economy are dated by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). (I am a member of this committee, but I do not speak for it, and I am writing here in a personal capacity.) The NBER's dates are regarded as official: the US Commerce Department and other government agencies rely on them in their own reporting and analysis of economic data. [...]

Assuming the current US expansion continues in July, it will break the record of ten years set in 1991-2001. But if the dates of American business cycles were determined by the rule that most other countries apply, the US recession of March to November 2001 would be erased. (It did not include two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, but rather two negative quarters separated by a positive one.) Under that interpretation, the US record, it seems, would instead be the 17-year expansion from the first quarter of 1991 to the fourth quarter of 2007. And the current recovery would still have a long way to go to top that.

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