In this paper an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose U.S. real GDP into trend and cycle components. The main findings are that there exist three cycles with a period of about two, five and 13 years, respectively, and that the long-run development during the last 50 years can be represented by a segmented linear trend with a break in the drift rate in the early seventies. A further result is a remarkable decrease in the volatility of the cycle component and the recursive residuals over the last two decades.