Great Recession

The Great Recession was a period of general economic decline observed in world markets during the late 2000s and early 2010s. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country. In terms of overall impact, the International Monetary Fund concluded that it was the worst global recession since World War II, and would remain so until the COVID-19 recession. According to the US National Bureau of Economic Research (the official arbiter of US recessions) the recession, as experienced in that country, began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, thus extending over 19 months. The Great Recession was related to the financial crisis of 2007–08 and U.S. subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–09. The Great Recession has resulted in the scarcity of valuable assets in the market economy and the collapse of the financial sector in the world economy.

Quotes

• Along came the Republicans, trickle-down economics — one of the worst ideas since snake oil — was put back into place. And we ended up with the great recession. President Obama had to rescue the economy. And I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves for doing that.
  • Hillary Clinton, Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami, Transcript by The New York Times (March 9, 2016)

• I believe we need to do more to help young people, who are left behind in the wake of the Great Recession, find those strategies and opportunities that will get them moving ahead again. And we’ve got to help older Americans who’ve displaced by automation and outsourcing in our changing economy.
  • Hillary Clinton, speech in Orlando, Florida. Transcript (September 21, 2016)

• Let's stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm. In fact, Donald (Trump) was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, "Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money." Well, it did collapse. ... We have come back from that abyss. And it has not been easy. So we're now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy, but the last thing we need to do is to go back to the policies that failed us in the first place.
  • Hillary Clinton, First 2016 presidential debate Transcript, Washington Post (September 26, 2016)

• By pandering to the self-interested claims of the masters of finance, Clinton did more to bring on the 2008 recession than President Bush.
  • Clive Hamilton, Trumpism as Whitelash (November 19, 2016)
• The massive costs of running the war on terror, in conjunction with the seemingly inexorable turn to a non-state-based credit rather than a savings-based economy, were among the factors that led to the second major challenge of the new millennium: the financial crisis, and its long corrosive aftermath of the Great Recession. Society was no riven by a biting austerity on one hand and an anti-immigrant backlash on the other.  Governments used up what remaining reserves of popular trust they had in fighting the fires of a seemingly unquenchable crisis.  Fatefully, this was also the moment when Europe was confronted by the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War (many of them fleeing the havoc unleashed by the global war on terror).  The social tensions sparked by some of these developments began to raise the specter of more desperate solutions drawn from the past.  Alarmed by such developments, one ninety-year old survivor of the Warsaw ghetto took a plea of remembrance to the international press. Fear and lies are terrible things, he warned: “do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse, as ours did.” Was anyone listening?  In Europe, the solidarity that had underpinned the European Union’s expansion for half a century entered its gravest crisis yet. In the US, the political atmosphere grew more, not less, tense under the nation’s first black president.  With public trust in the workings of Congress at its lowest ebb, and popular discontents soaring amid an illiberal surge, the conditions favored an outsider in the presidential elections of 2016.  What that outsider might then do only time, and power, would tell.
  • Simon Reid-Henry, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017 (2019), pp. 7-8

• It remains to be seen what the effect of the Great Recession will be on resistance to globalization. It seems clear, however, that if the recession grows deeper and extends over a long period of time, it will spur much greater resistance to globalization.
  • George Ritzer, Globalization - A Basic Text Chapter 16, Dealing with, Resisting, and the Futures of Globalization, p. 499 (2010)

• I felt I wanted to talk about the Fed’s mission, and I wanted to do so in understandable terms, and to emphasize that unemployment is part of our mission. The recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on those who have less education and income—middle-income and low-income families—and the Fed’s concern with the job market is a theme I’ve wanted to get across. Why are we doing all these things that are in the newspapers all the time? I was trying to explain that we’re doing this to help American families who are struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
  • Janet Yellen, "The Hand on the Lever" in The New Yorker (July 21, 2014) by Nicholas Lemann

See also

• 2020 stock market crash
• Great Depression