Global Recession

Everybody’s thinking it, but nobody’s saying it: global recession. While our modern-day, hyper-connected world is great (Google at your fingertips to help you research companies and find slow-mo puppy videos, mangoes from halfway around the world at the grocery store, the works), it also sets the world up for more risk. If one country’s stock market crashes, inevitably that will have a negative effect on everyone else too...especially the world’s leading markets.

A global recession is a recession that slows the economy of the whole world down (or, at least, many countries around the world). In technical terms, the IMF would measure a global recession by a fall in annual GDP per capita, and by the seven macroeconomic indicators: industrial production levels, trade, capital flow, oil consumption, unemployment rate, per-capita investment, and per-capita consumption. When the wheels of the economy start slowing, so do production, consumption, investment, and employment. That being said, measuring a global recession is no easy (or straightforward) task.

Officially, there’ve been four global recessions since WWII, with the latest one being in 2009 from the subprime mortgage crisis bubble, which burst in late 2007/early 2008.