Comparing Recessions II

From Terry Fitzgerald at the Minneapolis Fed.

You are correct that the "mildest, median, and harshest" recession lines do
not represent single recessions. Please allow me to try to justify our
procedure. We spent considerable time weighing alternative approaches.

In drawing our timeline "length of recessions" graphs, we wanted to
illustrate where the current recession lies relative to past recessions at
each month of the recession. So for each month (or quarter), the lines
would tell you what had been the largest, median, and smallest decline in
any recession to that point.

The median line would indicate that one-half of the past recessions had
experienced larger declines, and one-half had experienced smaller declines
to that point. Similarly, no recession had a larger decline to date than
the "harshest" line. (And similarly for the mildest line.)

One feature of this approach is that the mildest, median, and harshest lines do not shift over time. So we can update just the "current" line in our graphs without all the lines shifting.

…I knew that insightful readers might wonder about this point, and I hoped that the note would at least explain what we did.

We are not trying to do anything deceptive or misleading with these charts.
Our aim is only to provide some empirical context to the current recession.

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