Quickie: To Recess or not to Recess?

With the failed $700bn bail-out plan in the US, we can expect the recession to hit some (many?) countries really fast and very soon. Economists define recession as two straight quarters of economic decline. A quarter here means 3 months. The US share market, Dow Jones plunged 770 points or 6.9% of its value on the 29th September, its biggest drop in a day ever recorded. Although since then it has rebounded slightly, somewhat. The ripple-to-tsunami effect of this can be felt elsewhere including the drop of oil prices below $100 per barrel and of course stock markets in many parts of the world. As they say, “When US sneezes, the world catches a cold.”
I really like this paragraph that was used to expressed the gravity of the situation of this failed plan and I quote, “So grave are the consequences of this decision, our correspondent says, that the speaker of the house paused for several long minutes after the vote was taken before declaring it official. The legislation has failed, the crisis has not gone away.” The speaker of the house mentioned above is Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats speaker.

Anyways two ‘western’ countries have already moved into recession mode now. One of them being Ireland and the other is New Zealand (not exactly to the west of us!). Further readings can be found here:- Both links are extracted from BBC News because I’m a regular there.
It doesn’t help either that the economic growths of many first world countries including the Eurozone and Japan only hovers around 0-2% range. To put it bluntly, they are barely breathing above the water. Just a mini shove would do the trick to tilt their economy over into recession.
I don’t think that the grass is much greener on our backyard. In fact we are also currently dealing with another big problem that is politics. With talks of transition of power going on, it’s hard for the economy to be strong. I just hope that we’ll not be whacked with a double Whammy!!!