Welcome friends to another edition of “Economic Update,” a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I am your host, Richard Wolff. Today’s program is going to be dedicated to one particular topic: recession. It is what we are in now. It is what the country is fearful about. It is what we have been talking about across the mass media. It is time for some careful analysis of what this is and where it is taking us. Let us begin.
Recession. Here is the simple definition: it is when the economy turns down, usually suddenly, over a very few number of weeks and maybe a few months. Large numbers of people are either unemployed or forced to take part-time work or finding their jobs in danger. Small businesses go out of business. Medium and large businesses find their activities shrinking. They cannot produce as much. They cannot sell as much. Because of all of that, the tax revenues received by local communities and by the country as a whole start shrinking, which means that the government is pinched and cannot do what it normally would like to do and is asked to do by the people. In other words, it is an economic downturn. In fact, the word recession has lots of synonyms: downturn; bust; crash; crisis; depression. I could go on. Why is it that we have so many words?
— source democracyatwork.info | Richard Wolff | Aug 22, 2022