Great Recession

[Baker, John]

        It looks like the current deep and extended recession is to be
known as the Great Recession.  References using that term have become
particularly common in the past few days, especially with International
Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn's speech
yesterday, http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2009/031009.htm, in
which he remarked that "The global financial crisis - what we might call
the Great Recession - provides a sobering backdrop to our conference."

        The earliest use I see of initial-caps Great Recession to refer
to the current recession is a remarkably prescient article by Jesse
Eisinger from April 2008,
http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/wall-street/2008/04/14/The-Next-A
dministrations-Economy:  "The next president will take office during
what may well come to be known as the Great Recession, the worst
financial crisis of the post-World War II era, worse than the
savings-and-loan mess and worse than the stagflation of the 1970s."

        There had, of course, been use of the "great recession"
collocation earlier, such as in this blog posting by Nouriel Roubini on
August 23, 2006, http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini/142759:  "Expect
the great recession of 2007 to be much nastier, deeper and more
protracted than the 2001 recession."


John Baker

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