The unprecedented speed of decline is what stopped a managable slowdown from occuring, and that was caused by the Internet's ability to spread panic on a globalized scale literally in the few hours (which happenned to be a Sunday) when Lehman went down.
But, this mechanism for recovery will be unprecedentedly speedy too. Never in the history of global economics do to have systems that allow coordinated global sentiment to occur.
Every recession starts with a build up of factors which are like a drought in the bush, making it a tinderbox. Noone was in any doubt that a recession was going to happen, but noone knew when. Every recession has it's own trigger -- an event which is unsustainable within the tinderbox.
1972 was Oil. 1979 was trade unions, 1989 for the UK was the sterlings fall from ERM. 2000 was the dot.com bubble (which was sufficiently gradual not to cause a proper recession). 2008 was the global panic surrounding Lehman brothers' demise.
Because of the speed of the propgation of panic last year, inventories were excessive and investment stopped.
What's going to happen in 2016? I don't know, but my bets are on an unexpected crash in consumers' desire to purchase, based not on financial reasons, but on some other "panic" story that spreads globally within hours. Something like a discovery of exceedingly toxic chemicals randomly and unpredictably found in a significant proportion of consumables. It might even be caused by something to do with global warming, but I don't think any single event will occur of such magnitude in 2016 to scare the majority of the world.
Whatever will trigger the 2016 recession, it needs the following stuff:
- a fragile ecosystem behind it
- a singular event which changes attitudes
- and this event needs to be hard to fix
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