The current economy doesn't merit many superlatives, but it just earned an important one. As of this month, we're living through the third-longest expansion in U.S. history.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of such things, says the Great Recession ended in June 2009. March is the 93rd month of growth since then, surpassing the 92-month run of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" boom in the 1980s.
The only longer expansions were in the 1960s and the 1990s.
If we were measuring strength rather than length, the current episode wouldn't hold a candle to its predecessors. Gross domestic product has grown about 2 percent a year since 2010, roughly half the rate during the 1980s and 1990s expansions.
Still, stability is a big accomplishment. Many people thought we might tip into recession during the Greek debt crisis of 2012, or when the strong dollar hurt manufacturing in 2015, but the economy kept making forward progress.
Does this milestone inevitably put us closer to the beginning of the next recession than the end of the last one? Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chair, thinks not. "It's a myth that expansions die of old age," she said in December 2015.
Paul Christopher, global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, agrees with Yellen. "They typically die of a heart attack, and that heart attack is brought on by some sort of surge in spending, typically associated with an increase in debt," he said.
The culprit in the last recession was consumer debt, especially too much mortgage borrowing. In the 1990s, businesses became infatuated with technology and loaded up on debt.
Both consumers and companies have deleveraged since 2008. Household debt equaled 95 percent of GDP then but fell to 78 percent by 2015.
Companies still seem reluctant to spend, but consumers have become a little less debt-phobic in recent months. "We've made room on the credit cards, so there's room for consumers to spend more, but not a lot," Christopher said.
Wells Fargo's economic model shows a 33 percent chance of recession this year. That could rise to 50 percent by early 2019, Christopher said, if consumers continue to spend and borrow freely.
Kurt Rankin, a regional economist at PNC Bank, thinks this expansion has plenty of room to run. If we defined the term differently, he points out, it might even be considered youthful.
Rankin is talking about a distinction between recovery _ climbing out of a recession _ and expansion. If you're measuring jobs, it took the U.S. until mid-2014 to regain what it lost in 2008-09. We've been adding new jobs, beyond the previous peak, for less than three years.
"Until there's some sort of bubble out there, or some sort of disruption, there's no fundamental reason why a recession should be on anybody's radar for at least a couple of years," Rankin said.
If he's right, this slow-motion juggernaut of an expansion will continue to make history. In a little over a year, it will be the second-longest ever. By mid-2019, it could set the endurance record.
By the way, President Donald Trump and his supporters have talked about raising the economy's growth rate to 4 percent, but that isn't going to happen so late in the cycle.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Trump avoids making big mistakes that would cause a recession. If we can't have strength, more length isn't a bad consolation prize.
