For the first time ever, or at least since

official tallying began, the U.S.

economy has started and ended an entire decade

without entering a recession.

That means this economic expansion is now older

than the i-Pad Instagram and the Tesla Model S

From the end of 2009 to the end of 2019, the U.S.

economy has added more than 20 million jobs.

We have launched an economic boom, the likes of

which we have never seen before.

It's been the longest economic expansion in the

country's history taking place in a decade marked

by the memory of the Great Recession and by

unprecedented access to information about the

state of the economy.

Both consumers have been more cautious and

businesses have also become more cautious, simply

out of fear that we might experience something

similar to what we saw 10 years ago.

But just because it's the longest expansion

doesn't necessarily mean it's the strongest.

Overall economic growth over the past decade has

been slower compared to previous booms.

And not everyone is reaping the benefits.

Today in America, you got three people owning

more wealth than the bottom half of America.

So how did the U.S. get through this historic

decade? And will it last?

The simplest explanation for how the U.S.

economy has avoided a recession during this

decade is that it was coming from a very low

point at the end of the last decade.

As some economists have put it:

The deeper the hole, the longer it takes to climb

out. None of us anticipated the full

ramifications and extent of the crisis.

The economic picture from 2007 to 2009 was so

gloomy it's called the Great Recession.

Many experts define a recession as two

consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

GDP or gross domestic product is one metric to

gauge the overall health of the economy.

In the U.S., a nonprofit organization called the

National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER,

decides if the economy has entered a recession.

The NBER takes into account GDP and a wider range

of measures like income, employment, industrial

production and wholesale-retail sales.

U.S. government agencies like the Treasury

Department and the Federal Reserve go by the

NBER's definition of a recession.

The most recent recession, according to NBER's

definition, was the Great Recession.

From 2007 to 2009.

U.S. GDP fell 4.3

percent. The unemployment rate doubled from 5

percent to 10 percent.

And house prices and stock markets crashed.

People were hit essentially both in terms of

losing their jobs and a lot of people were also

hit very significant in terms of losing their

homes and home prices going down and the stock

market going down. The only other time the

economy was in worse shape?

During the Great Depression in the 1930s.

A stock market crash and a series of banking

panics put an end to the economic boom of the

Roaring 20s. Millions of Americans lost their

jobs and livelihoods as the downturn lasted an

entire decade.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s,

unemployment peaked at almost 25 percent.

There were booms and busts and every decade after

World War Two. But one notable thing started to

happen. Economic expansions lasted longer.

The period from the mid-1980s to 2007 became

known as the Great Moderation.

Prices remain stable, and while there were

occasional dips on the whole, the economy chugged

along. One reason for this is that officials at

the Federal Reserve got more effective at

responding to changes in the economy and because

inflation was steady.

Policymakers could act aggressively when the next

crisis came along.

When the Great Recession hit, policymakers in DC

took unprecedented steps to try to get the

economy back on track.

Their actions resulted in trillions of dollars of

economic stimulus.

A very important reason why the U.S.

had had such a long and very protracted expansion

is that U.S.

fiscal policy and monetary policy, meaning the

Federal Reserve and politicians, were much more

quick out of the box in terms of supporting the

economy. In 2008, Congress authorized the

Treasury Department to invest hundreds of

billions of dollars to try to revitalize the

country's ailing financial and auto sectors as

part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program,

otherwise known as TARP.

A year later in 2009, President Obama signed the

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The law pumped hundreds of billions of dollars

into areas like infrastructure and clean energy.

The biggest stimulus effort was underway in

another part of Washington at the Federal

Reserve. By the end of 2008, the central bank had

already lowered its key interest rate to

essentially zero. So it undertook an unusual

effort called quantitative easing, or QE.

David Wilcox worked at the Federal Reserve Board

during the crisis in the Division of Research and

Statistics. The Fed was able to come in and

purchase about 4 trillion dollars worth of

securities, drive up their price and therefore

bring down the interest rate at which businesses

were able to borrow.

Households were able to take out a mortgage.

Do you think that that those QE efforts helped

the economy recover and get to the point where it

is today? There is no question in my mind and

there's no question in any of the academic

literature that absent those steps, you would

have had an implosion of the economy, the likes

of which we hadn't seen since the 1930s.

The Fed has kept borrowing rates low throughout

the decade, gradually raising them at the end of

2015 through 2018 and then quickly cutting again

in 2019 to try to fend off any instability in the

economy. This past decade has been characterized

by very low interest rates and generally fiscal

stimulus. That means lower taxes, higher

government spending. In December 2017, President

Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,

which slashed corporate tax rates for American

companies. The effect was a boost to GDP at the

start of 2018.

Regulation rollbacks by the Trump administration

have also cut down some costs for businesses.

There's no denying the American economy is in

better shape at the end of this decade than the

last. As of December 2019, it expanded for a

record 126 straight months while the unemployment

rate was near its lowest level in 50 years.

Even though the last 10 years brought the longest

expansion ever in the US, it hasn't exactly been

an economic boom by historical standards.

Many Americans still feel left behind and this

decade has been marked as much by the growing

economy as increasing inequality.

There are pockets of the country and important

groups of individuals, communities, families,

households who still are not enjoying anything

that they would describe as economic prosperity.

GDP growth during this recovery has been slower

than in previous economic expansions.

Some investors point to mini recessions over the

past 10 years where GDP growth has just barely

exceeded 0 percent.

We've had a number of mini cycles within this

expansion, but generally speaking, if you look at

GDP over the last 10 years, it has really, and it

looks just amazing, been 2 percent for a very,

very long time. So it has been relatively flat.

The memory of the financial crisis has made

consumers and businesses more cautious about

spending money and more attuned to the next

recession. Unlike in previous decades, the

Internet has given consumers access to the latest

news and economic indicators, potentially making

them hyper aware of any changes in the economy.

I think because there was so many things that we

all missed in the financial crisis, both before

and when he was going on.

In terms of the speed of the slowdown, I do think

that both the press and consumers and the Federal

Reserve and us in financial markets are basically

much more alert to what's going on.

That caution has meant there aren't imbalances in

the financial system which has helped the

recovery go on for longer.

Typically, expansions end because they overheat.

What I mean by that is the economy is rip-

roaring, booming.

You know, you see a lot of construction,

overbuilding. You see a lot of borrowing, high

leverage. You see a lot of speculation in

markets. But in this expansion, we never really

got going. We don't have that overbuilding

problem. We don't have over-leverage in general.

But some of the steps policymakers took during

the crisis have only made inequality worse.

One glaring blemish is the gap between the haves

and the have nots. Look no further than the stock

market. U.S. markets are near record highs, but

many Americans have missed out on the bull run.

By one estimate, the wealthiest 10 percent of

Americans own more than 80 percent of the stock

market's wealth. As the stock market rises, you

know that this benefits that the top 20 percent

and really the top 10 percent and really the top

1 percent and really the top one tenth of 1

percent. So the wealth distribution is gotten

much more skewed. The other thing that's happened

is homeownership rates have declined.

Homeownership was key to the wealth of

middle-income Americans.

That obviously got creamed in the financial

crisis and the housing bust.

And so homeownership rate today is meaningfully

lower than it was when it peaked ten, fifteen

years ago. And that means that middle-income

Americans just haven't been able to build wealth.

Economists like to say expansions don't die of

old age, meaning there's no time limit for how

long a period of growth can happen.

But there are still warning signals that could be

pointing to the next recession.

Record low interest rates have fueled record high

debt levels. Some economists and investors fear

U.S. public debt, which totals more than 23

trillion dollars, is the next ticking time bomb.

That debt is only set to go up in the next

decades as America's population gets older.

And if interest rates go up, it will be even

harder for the government to pay off.

A lot of discussions whether the expansion can

continue or not is all about: Are we vulnerable

in the expansion because of student debt being so

high? Are we vulnerable in the expansion because

of corporate debt being so high?

Political and trade uncertainty are also creating

unease about the future health of the economy as

the U.S. enters a new decade.

The trade war that could really screw things up.

Businesses are very nervous, particularly larger

business with multinational operations.

Others look to technical indicators like the

yield curve, which has been flashing recession

signals. We know there will be a next recession.

We just don't know when it will be.

We don't know whether it will be six months from

now, a year from now or three years from now.

We haven't seen the last economic recession in

U.S. history. But maybe as the chairman of the

Fed has said, there can't be a bust when there

hasn't been a boom in the first place.

What we've seen is three of the four longest

business cycles in U.S.

recorded history have been quite recent.

So we're seeing that. And if you look at today's,

look at today's economy, there's nothing that's

really booming that would that would want to

bust, in other words. It's a pretty sustainable

picture.