Whose recovery is it anyway?
Business Times - 08 Oct 2009 Whose recovery is it anyway? Most Americans view the current recovery to be more statistical or technical than real By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT ECONOMISTS have yet to embrace a universal term for the downturn that the American and global economies have been experiencing since December 2007. At the early stages of the slump when it looked as though the world as we had known it was coming to an end, some pundits were naming it the Great Depression II. The less apocalyptic-sounding names included the Credit Crunch and the Financial Crisis. Now that things seem to be under control - or so everyone hopes - the more common term used by the experts is the Great Recession. Indeed, a depression usually describes any economic downturn where real gross domestic product declines by more than 10 per cent, while a recession is an economic downturn that is less severe. And given that this has been the worst American economic recession since the end of World War...