List of US recessions

Some advice from older men I've received is that the US economy goes in cycles. My dad has often said that we go into a recession every 8 to 10 years. If a man is really savvy with investments, he can make lots of money by predicting these recessions.

The 8 to 10 year cycle is just a rule of thumb. My boss is a CFO. When I mentioned this idea to him he said there was no such thing as a cycle. At the very least, a man cannot accurately predict when a recession is going to happen.

Curious about these differing opinions, I decided to look up a list of official US recessions. This list is easy to find on Wikipedia. For anyone that doesn't know, a recession happens when the United States experiences two consecutive quarters where GDP contracts (this is however also may be rule of thumb as this is not used by NBER). Just because things feel terrible doesn't necessary mean it is a recession although I will admit that there is some suspicion to how the government calculates and provides the figures. Nonetheless, I'm only looking at official recessions.

Since January 1960 to today, the United States has been in 8 official recessions. This averages to one recession every 6.875 years. Admittedly, I'm only looking at 55 years of time, but I didn't feel it necessary to go back before 1960. The list of recessions are as follows.

Apr 1960 to Feb 1961
Dec 1969 to Nov 1970
Nov 1973 to Mar 1975
Jan 1980 to Jul 1980
Jul 1981 to Nov 1982
Jul 1990 to Mar 1991
Mar 2001 to Nov 2001
Dec 2007 to Jun 2009

Looking at this list, it kind of looks like the beginning of each decade has been in a recession.

1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2001, and 2009 are all years that have experienced a recession. Not a perfect line but it looks like basis for a good rule of thumb. A few of the recessions throw the rule of thumb off though. I'm looking mainly at the recession beginning in November 1973. That point looks out of line. There is also the recession that started July 1981 which started only one year after the prior recession. Since these recessions were so close together, I can see that older men would just group these two recessions together.

I can understand both view points. A US recessions tends to happen every 10 years but a recession can easily happen out of line making predictions inaccurate. Looking at the last 8 recessions, it looks like we are coming due for another recession. The last recession ended in June 2009 and 10 years from that would be June 2019. I won't try to make a solid prediction, I just will not be surprised if a recession happened anytime within the next 5 years.