Graph and download economic data for Dates of U.S. recessions as inferred by GDP-based recession indicator (JHDUSRGDPBR) from Q4 1967 to Q1 2025 about recession indicators, GDP, and USA.

The Long Depression was, by a large margin, the longest-lasting recession in U.S. history. It began in the U.S. with the Panic of 1873, and lasted for over five years. This depression was the largest in a series of recessions at the turn of the 20th century, which proved to be a period of overall stagnation as the U.S. financial markets failed to keep pace with industrialization and changes in monetary policy. Great Depression The Great Depression, however, is widely considered to have been the most severe recession in U.S. history. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the country's economy collapsed, wages fell and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. It would take almost four years for recovery to begin. Additionally, U.S. expansion and integration in international markets allowed the depression to become a global event, which became a major catalyst in the build up to the Second World War. Decreasing severity When comparing recessions before and after the Great Depression, they have generally become shorter and less frequent over time. Only three recessions in the latter period have lasted more than one year. Additionally, while there were 12 recessions between 1880 and 1920, there were only six recessions between 1980 and 2020. The most severe recession in recent years was the financial crisis of 2007 (known as the Great Recession), where irresponsible lending policies and lack of government regulation allowed for a property bubble to develop and become detached from the economy over time, this eventually became untenable and the bubble burst. Although the causes of both the Great Depression and Great Recession were similar in many aspects, economists have been able to use historical evidence to try and predict, prevent, or limit the impact of future recessions.

The Covid-19 pandemic saw growth fall by 2.2 percent, compared with an increase of 2.5 percent the year before. The last time the real GDP growth rates fell by a similar level was during the Great Recession in 2009, and the only other time since the Second World War where real GDP fell by more than one percent was in the early 1980s recession. The given records began following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and GDP growth fluctuated greatly between the Great Depression and the 1950s, before growth became more consistent.

A series of recessions in the 1970s and 1980s meant that unemployment rates in some Western European countries rose to their highest levels since the Great Depression in the 1930s. While countries such as West Germany closed out the period of prosperity (known as the "Golden Age of Capitalism") with unemployment rates below one percent, figures rose gradually in the 1970s, and then furthermore in the 1980s. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the highest levels of unemployment in the listed countries were observed in Ireland and the United States; although the highest levels of unemployment in the 1980s were observed in Spain, during its transition to democracy. Of the major economic powers listed here, Japan saw the least amount of fluctuation, with a high of just 2.5 percent in the given periods; almost half of the U.S.' lowest unemployment figure in these periods.

During the period beginning roughly in the mid-1980s until the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008), the U.S. economy experienced a time of relative economic calm, with low inflation and consistent GDP growth. Compared with the turbulent economic era which had preceded it in the 1970s and the early 1980s, the lack of extreme fluctuations in the business cycle led some commentators to suggest that macroeconomic issues such as high inflation, long-term unemployment and financial crises were a thing of the past. Indeed, the President of the American Economic Association, Professor Robert Lucas, famously proclaimed in 2003 that "central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes". Ben Bernanke, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient, coined the term 'the Great Moderation' to describe this era of newfound economic confidence. The era came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the GFC in the Summer of 2007, as the U.S. financial system began to crash due to a downturn in the real estate market.

Causes of the Great Moderation, and its downfall

A number of factors have been cited as contributing to the Great Moderation including central bank monetary policies, the shift from manufacturing to services in the economy, improvements in information technology and management practices, as well as reduced energy prices. The period coincided with the term of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), famous for the 'Greenspan put', a policy which meant that the Fed would proactively address downturns in the stock market using its monetary policy tools. These economic factors came to prominence at the same time as the end of the Cold War (1947-1991), with the U.S. attaining a new level of hegemony in global politics, as its main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. During the Great Moderation, the U.S. experienced a recession twice, between July 1990 and March 1991, and again from March 2001 tom November 2001, however, these relatively short recessions did not knock the U.S. off its growth path. The build up of household and corporate debt over the early 2000s eventually led to the Global Financial Crisis, as the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2007 reverberated across the financial system, with a subsequent credit freeze and mass defaults.

From the late 19th century until the 1980s, the United States' unemployment rate was generally somewhere between three and ten percent of the total workforce. The periods when it peaked were in times of recession or depression - the Panic of 1893, which lasted until 1897, saw unemployment peak at over 18 percent, whereas the post-WWI recession saw unemployment spike to almost 12 percent in 1921.

However, the longest and most-severe period of mass unemployment in U.S. history came during the Great Depression - unemployment rose from just 3.2 percent in 1929 to one quarter of the total workforce in 1933, and it was not until the Second World War until it fell below five percent once more. Since this time, unemployment has never exceeded 10 percent, although it did come close during the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s.

More recent unemployment statistics for the U.S. can be found here.

In the 1st quarter of 2025, personal savings amounted to 3.97 percent of the disposable income in the United States. The personal savings rate peaked in 2020, when U.S. households saved on average over 15 percent of their income. After that, it has remained between three and five percent. Savings during recessions During recessions, households often tend to increase their savings due to economic uncertainty and to compensate for any possible loss of income, which could occur, for example, in the case of falling into unemployment. For example, as seen in this statistic, the savings rate increased noticeably between 2007 and 2012, coinciding with a period of crisis. However, there are also factors that affect the amount of money that households can manage to set aside, such as inflation. Saving can be particularly difficult during periods when the inflation rate has been higher than the growth rates of wages. Savings accounts The value of savings deposits and other checkable deposits in the U.S. amounted to roughly 11 trillion U.S. dollars in early 2025, even after a significant fall in the amount of money placed in those types of instruments. In other words, savings accounts are a type of financial asset that is very widely used among households to save money. Nevertheless, interest rates of savings’ accounts differ a lot from one financial institution to another. Some of the lesser-known online banks had the highest interest rates, while the major banks often offered lower interest rates.