The U.S. economic expansion and recovery from the Great Recession officially made history on Monday, July 1: The 10-year, 121-month expansion that started in June 2009 is now the longest ever.
This story by Carmen Reinicke originally appeared in Market Insider.
The previous record was set during the 120-month expansion from March 1991 to March 2001, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. It ended as the dotcom bubble burst.
While the current expansion is a record breaker, it’s also been one of the slowest. Gross Domestic Product has grown 25 percent cumulatively since the start of the expansion, which is lower than other booms on record. The unemployment rate sits at 3.6 percent, its lowest point since 1969. It is down from a peak of 10 percent in October 2009, but job growth took much longer during this recovery than during other recoveries postwar.
There have been mixed signals from the U.S. economy and markets about the likelihood of a recession on the horizon. On one hand, the S&P 500 has soared to new highs. On the other, trade tensions sparked a panic in the bond market, sending the yield on the 10-year Treasury below 2 percent. As investors bought more long-term Treasuries, they shrank the gap between long-dated yields and short-term ones. This triggered a yield-curve inversion, long-watched as a sign that a recession was ahead.
Trade tensions have also rocked the global economy and contributed to signs of a slowdown outside the U.S. While there was a sigh of relief Monday after President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a trade truce, it was short-lived; on Tuesday, the US threatened to expand tariffs against Europe as part of a dispute over aircraft subsidies, sending stocks down on the news.
