Recent events suggest that the death of the business cycle has been exaggerated; the issue of how one learns about and monitors the business cycle remains centre stage. Advent of the Euro and the potential for tensions when sovereign nations subsume their monetary policy into a single response makes monitoring the business cycle of particular interest for policy makers. In this paper we summarize recent research on three questions relating to cycles in economic activity - how to extract cyclical information, how to analyse it, and how to enquire into what special difficulties might be encountered when using cyclical indicators.