Economic Recession

An economic recession is ugly. Consumers lose their jobs, lose their homes, file for bankruptcy and tighten spending. Businesses shed jobs, cut wages, lay-off employees and collapse. Lending institutions have trouble collecting from debtors and this dries up their liquid assets. Investors see drops in profits and nervously pull their money out. As a result, our Gross Domestic Product declines and our nation as a whole becomes poorer. Is there no end in sight for our current despair? Global economics experts have a thing or two to say about the current crisis. The start of ending the recession is to stop focusing on the causes of economic recession and look for the benefits of economic recession.

Anyone who studies basic economics saw the current recession coming for several years now, although it was hard to predict just how hard and how fast we'd fall or what is the real causes of economic recession. Mere months before the bottom fell out, causing enormous financial institutions and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to collapse, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was quoted as saying, "the fundamentals of the economy are sound." In Economics 101, students learn the signs of a recession, which are job losses, exports support manufacturing, a drop in housing prices, a decline in profits, limited impact of short-term stimulus dollars, rising inventories, artificially low interest rates which to some are some of the benefits of economic recession, lack of buyer confidence and lack of investor confidence. The American economy had all the ingredients for the perfect disaster.

Microeconomics experts have been busy examining how individual households and businesses make decisions without knowing the causes of economic recession. When consumer spending goes down, companies first cut jobs and sometimes they collapse. This, in turn, causes more consumers to stop spending because they've lost their jobs, which may affect other unrelated businesses but for a small number of confident people there are benefits of economic recession. In the current economic recession, massive-scale job losses began in February 2008, when 63,000 jobs were shed. By the following September, another 156,000 jobs were lost, which was followed by an astounding 533,000 job cuts in November, which was the largest single-month job loss since the Great Depression. From December of 2007 to March 2009, there have been 5.1 million job losses. Over this same period, investor and consumer confidence has declined further, thus making it more difficult to rebound.

The economic recession has spread its insidious tentacles outside of the U.S. to global economics, hurting countries like Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Seychelles, Venezuela, Ukraine and Jamaica. Economics research shows that even the UK, Japan, China and Canada are feeling the pinch of America's pain. There's no telling how long we'll be in this recession or what the formula is for digging out, but many Americans are willing to trust the Obama-Biden administration with the task, while simply hoping and praying that we'll see a turnaround soon. One day we may be able to look back and find the benefits of economic recession and the best we could hope for would be in understand the causes of economic recession.