I will fast-forward past the early years of the expansion and pick up the story in December 2015.9 The unemployment rate had fallen  7  Indeed, as I noted at this symposium last year, inflation ran surprisingly low in the second half of the 1990s (Powell, 2018). 8 This was an odd recession to classify.
The collapse of the tech bubble was followed by several quarters of generally slow positive growth. Regarding declaring the 2001 recession, the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee stated, “Before the [September 11] attacks, it is possible that the decline in the economy would have been too mild to qualify as a recession” (NBER, 2001, p. 8).