Word Search: 'Subprime' and 'Recession' in the WSJ and the New York Times

Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit: The oft labeled implosion in the "subprime" mortgage market has caused some to speculate that the fallout could possibly lead to a recession. With that in mind we did a word search for the terms "subprime" and "recession" in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

As the chart below highlights, during the month of March we saw a large uptick in occurrences of the word "subprime" and to a lesser degree in "recession." Interestingly though, while occurrences of the term "subprime" are still high based on the past three years of data, occurrences of recession are at multi-year lows. It seems as though no one wants to talk about a recession anymore after so many naysayers have been proved wrong over the last three years.

We were also curious what the frequency of the term "recession" was before and during the most recent recession in 2001 (highlighted in red below). So for that term we extended our search back to 1998 and found that occurrences of the term spiked two months before the actual official start of the recession. Interestingly though, occurrences spiked one month after the recession was officially over as well.