What is a recession?
When you hear people on tv talk about recession, specifically they can say that we are not in a recession… or that we haven’t been in a recession… because we haven’t had 2 straight quarters with a reduction in our GDP. That’s a great definition for tv people, but not very accurate for real life. A basic way to think of a recession, or more specifically the US’s current recession, is to think of a balloon returning to it’s original state. Most people agree that there was a housing “bubble”. That bubble, despite how it was created, was an artificial inflation of our economy. Now, the economy wants to correct itself. It wants to get back to a natural state. How then can we escape the reality that this economy must contract. Furthermore, the housing bubble was not the problem, it was a symptom. Our economy as a whole has been sick for quite some time. Apart from massive cuts in government spending, we simply must let it be.
