Bob Hall, the academic responsible for officially declaring whether the United States has fallen into a recession, told The Times yesterday that current economic conditions “looked very close” to those experienced in 1967, when the world’s biggest economy suffered a slowdown but narrowly avoided a recession.

Mr Hall, chairman of the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), said that in 1967 “the [US] economy looked as it does today”, having suffered “a short-lived pause in GDP” and “a small scale financial crisis”. He noted that in 1968 the US economy rebounded strongly.

Mr Hall’s comments will raise hope on Wall Street that the turmoil experienced in America’s credit markets, together with slowing growth and rising unemployment, may not signal that America is set for recession.

The Business Cycle Dating Committee is responsible for monitoring economic data and declaring when one business cycle has ended and another started. The committee forms part of an independent charity and waits until it has sufficient, revised data to establish the historic state of the US economy.

The NBER takes its time when reaching its pronouncements. In cases where America has fallen into a recession, the committee often does not declare a recession until the country has pulled itself out of the slump. “Our approach is historical and backward-looking,” Mr Hall said.

Wall Street, however, may decide by the end of this week whether the US is in a technical recession, with key data on payrolls, industrial production, business inventories and retail sales all due out in the next five days. Such a declaration would mark the first recession since 2001.

“Within a week, we could know if we are in a recession,” Kevin Logan, senior economist at Dresdner Klein-wort, the investment bank in New York, said.

This week’s data - something like a Super Tuesday for the economy - could draw to a close an economic chapter that has left economists, financiers, central bankers, homeowners and the media worrying about whether America is on the brink of a slowdown. Two months ago Merrill Lynch, the US investment bank, went as far as declaring that America was already in a recession. It was waiting only for the official data to prove it right.

Mr Logan said that the Dating Committee was “in the business of writing history. We have to wait a long time for their pronouncements. They look at all the revised data and then declare it. We [Wall Street] can’t wait that long.”

More frustratingly, while Wall Street obsesses over individual strands of economic data and tries to extrapolate the speed and direction of the economy, the NBER’s criteria for declaring a reccession are more arbitrary.

One definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth - if the economy shrinks for at least six months. But this is not the only measure. An economy can continue to grow, albeit at a slow pace, and still be in a recession. The Dating Committee takes a range of data and takes a view.

This time the handful of statistics would include payrolls, industrial production, real personal income and business figures, such as shipments and retail sales. The committee will also consider data on the housing market.

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