Fifty years of U.S. growth, folded into one band

Fifty years of U.S. growth, folded into one band

Question. When did U.S. quarterly growth turn negative, and how deep did it go?

• Encoding. A native horizon mark folds positive and negative annualized quarterly growth into compact bands.
• Ordering. Quarter order, with the initial unavailable change left null.
• Baseline. Zero means no quarterly GDP change; the horizon is not rebased to its first observation.
• Scale. Shared growth magnitude; three bands are a display choice, not economic categories.

What this design gives up

Folding reduces direct vertical reading and can obscure the size of extremes. The original growth line is the necessary companion.

This is an old source vintage, not current revised GDP. Annualizing a quarterly change is a mathematical convention, not the year-on-year rate. The first quarter has no preceding observation in this file.