pstarr wrote:Even the current $40/barrel oil is actually quite expensive in historical terms.
Cog wrote:Doesn't feel like a recession.
Global RecessionDEFINITION of 'Global Recession'
An extended period of economic decline around the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) uses a broad set of criteria to identify global recessions, including a decrease in per-capita gross domestic product worldwide. According to the IMF’s definition, this drop in global output must coincide with a weakening of other macroeconomic indicators, such as trade, capital flows and employment. While there’s no official definition of a global recession, the criteria established by the IMF carries significant weight because of the organization’s stature across the globe. In contrast to some definitions of a recession, the IMF looks at more than a decline in gross domestic product (GDP). There must also be a deterioration of other economic factors, ranging from oil consumption to employment rates.
According to the IMF, there have been four global recessions since World War II, beginning in 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2009, respectively. This last recession was the deepest and widest of them all. Since 2010, the world economy has been in a process of recovery, albeit a slow one.
Zero HedgeZero Hedge is a batshit insane Austrian economics-based finance blog. It has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions. Multiple seemingly unrelated subjects to point towards a consistent theme of economic collapse any day now.
World Economic OutlookSix years after the world economy emerged from its broadest and deepest postwar recession, a return to robust and synchronized global expansion remains elusive. The revised forecasts in this latest World Economic Outlook report underscore the challenges all countries face. Despite considerable differences in country-specific outlooks, the new forecasts mark down expected near-term growth rates marginally, but nearly across the board. Moreover, downside risks to the world economy appear more pronounced than they did just a few months ago.
The ongoing experience of slow productivity growth suggests that long-run potential output growth may have fallen broadly across economies. Persistently low investment helps explain limited labor productivity and wage gains, although the joint productivity of all factors of production, not just labor, has also been slow. Low aggregate demand is one factor that discourages investment, as the last World Economic Outlook report showed. Slow expected potential growth itself dampens aggregate demand, further limiting investment, in a vicious circle. Aging populations further restrain investment in a number of countries; in some others, institutional shortcomings or political instability are deterrents. In its more extreme forms, political conflict has created a large global stock of displaced persons, both within and across borders. The economic and social costs are immense.
Recessions may have a permanent negative effect not only on trend productivity levels, but on trend productivity growth. This mechanism would make current low productivity forecasts look in part like products of the post-2007 turbulence. Some economic historians advance the idea that the postwar global growth experience largely reflects diminishing returns along the extensive margin of technological innovation, punctuated temporarily by the entry of China and the former nations of the Soviet Union into the global market economy and by the information and communications technology revolution.
Commodity exporters in particular have seen sharp depreciations of their currencies, but a general trend of reduced financial inflows to emerging markets has resulted in more generalized depreciation against the U.S. dollar, euro, and yen. Past attempts by emerging markets to fix their exchange rates in the face of large financial outflows had quite negative consequences for global financial stability.
In an environment of declining commodity prices, reduced capital flows to emerging markets and pressure on their currencies, and increasing financial market volatility, downside risks to the outlook have risen, particularly for emerging market and developing economies.
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