The following graph shows year on year changes of real Personal Consumption Expenditure from January 1960 to August 2015.

Among other things it is an indicator of the severity of the eight recessions flagged as such by the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The recession from March 2001 to November 2001 was scarcely a recession. In trying to recover from it, the Fed first created assets bubbles in the housing and equity markets and then blew them up. The recession from December 1969 to November 1970 too scarcely qualifies as a recession.

The current recovery is the slowest and least energetic on record.