I dunno. If you take a random walk and label the parts that go up as "growth" and the parts that go down as "recession" don't you get a similarly compelling 'narrative'? The picture looks far from periodic to me other than the basic generalization that "it goes up for some time until it stops going up at which point it goes down and also it doesn't get too far from 0."

(And what is the vertical axis supposed to be labelled as? I don't even know what the chart is of.)