Recessions vs Expansions

This article from Visual Capitalist uses US data, and the NBER definition of recession, but has some really nice graphics that you might want to use in your lessons:

The one below is nice for showing the characteristics of different stages of the economic cycle, but I can't quite work out the significance of the flags. I'm assuming it probably represented where different countries were in their cycle when the article was published (Jan 2020), but there is no reference to it in the text!

I'd quite like to challenge students to use this table to assess whereabouts the US is on the economic cycle.