It's been on the news more and more, the term recession. Everyone has their own opinion on what the word means, but what does it really mean? We can look at a few places for answers. "A recession is when GDP growth slows, businesses stop expanding, employment falls, unemployment rises, and housing prices decline. For those reasons, many experts say the U.S. is actually in a recession now." http://useconomy.about.com/od/grossdomesticproduct/f/Recession.htm So then what is a depression? How much of a difference is there between a depression and a recession? A depression is a prolonged recession where GDP declines more than 10 percentage points and unemployment gets higher. To avoid this, we must make sure this recession doesn't get any worse. Well everyone knows about the great depression, but have we been in a recession since then? "The US economy has officially been declared to have been in recession since December 2007 - the longest downturn since 1982 "http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1015416.shtml I never really heard about recessions before now because I was younger and didn't pay attention or care. It seems like there's been more recessions than I thought there have been. And none of these have turned into a depression. It all depends on how our government will handle the situation. "This downturn promises to be the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s," said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist with MFR, Inc., a New York forecasting firm. "We've only just started. I can't see bottoming out until sometime in 2010."http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/investing/bal-economy1202,0,2805606.story So this particular recession is the worst it's been in a really long time. It'll be tough for everyone for a long time but if we work hard we can manage to get out of this recession. So how do we get out of a recession? Well this is the hard part. The way we got out of the great depression was WWII. This however won't really help us now. Everywhere I read said different things but one recurring idea was the government spending more on American things which pumps money back into the system. People can spend this money and save this money for things they need.
Just recently the government named out situation a recession. Because of recession's definition it would have been unwise to name it that too early. Calling it a recession can be positive and negative. The positive is the government is recognizing this economic crisis. Other countries get worried when our economy is bad because we affect them. They'll want to help us out in this case. Some negatives however are it puts people in a little bit of a panic. People worry if it's going to be the next depression. They don't want to think that this will happen. This means even harder times than we already have. People have different ideas on how to get out of this recession. A suggestion I have is the government creating jobs. This is a way to get things done and it pumps money back into the system. It has a domino affect. These workers get money and spend it on things and those stores or restaurants can hire more people and the money will be flowing better this way. During the great depression this is one of the things they did. Create jobs I think is the best way to help our economy the most. We're in hard times right now but we need to stay focused and work hard and hopefully we'll be out of this recession sooner.