Overview

If you wanted to track the nation's fall into recession, and needed to monitor trends that might indicate better times ahead, your best bet is the continual stream of reports and analysis from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Its "Gross Domestic Product" statistic - "the market value of goods and services produced by labor and property in the United States" - is one of the leading measurements of the U.S. economic health; a movement up or down in the GDP is front-page news. The bureau also tracks domestic statistics on personal income and spending, corporate profits and other data points at both the national, state and metropolitan area-levels.

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