GREAT RECESSION

This term for the fine financial mess we’re all in began to appear throughout the world following a widely reported speech by the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on 10 March 2009: “I think that we can now say that we’ve entered a Great Recession.” Note the capital letters.

This follows a period in which writers had been casting around for a suitable term. William Safire recorded several in his On Language column in the New York Times on 9 February, including global economic crisis, credit crunch and market crash and wrote of other choices that “Slump is too cheerful and depression too alarmist, especially when capitalized. Economic Armageddon is panic-stricken, though the combination of four-syllable words nicely fills the mouth.” He also noted the rise of Great Recession.

Catherine Rampell wrote about it in the same paper the day after Mr Strauss-Kahn’s speech, illustrating her comments with a chart taken from the Nexis newspaper database. This showed that the term caught on in December 2008, a landmark usage appearing on the US Federal News Service on 5 December: “Some economists are already calling this ‘the Great Recession’ because they fear it may be longer and deeper than any recession in recent history.” An early example was in a prescient article by Jesse Eisinger in Portfolio, dated April 2008: “The next president will take office during what may well come to be known as the Great Recession.”

Ms Rampell notes that the term isn’t new and had been used for the earlier downturns of 1974-75, 1979-82, the early 1990s and 2001. Hundreds of examples are on record that refer to these dates. Why commentators should keep returning to it is puzzling, though the desire to be reporting on a great catastrophe is innate to every journalist and superlatives sell papers. The difference this time is the stimulus given to it by Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s speech. It is probable — at this stage we can be no more definite — that the current crisis will become the definitive Great Recession and that the next will need some new term.

Just as the “Great Recession” ratchets up unemployment, the Rudd Government is making it less attractive to employ labour.

The Australian, 12 Mar. 2009

We may well be in the grip of a “Great Recession” but there was at least one very small piece of good news on the economics front on Tuesday.

Daily Telegraph, 10 Mar. 2009

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