Piggybank

Is This a Recession? Wrong Question.

A very US centric contribution IMO. As European i am more concerned about our own economy's. Still, if we go on the symantics front, a recession is indeed 2 quarters of negative growth, wich we havn't got yet in most places in Europe or USA. So i think there is few point about arguing that recession is something else.

The company results are all fairly good, could be better, but most company's do not really seem to be in trouble. This "recession" originates from the US banking sector, and it is easpecially the banking sector even globally who is doing bad. Apart from that we seem to have some sort of energy crisis, wich does hurt margins of many company'sn mainly trough the rise in oil price.

SO my conclusion is that pure technicly indeed we havn't got a recession. What we have is an banking system wich has done some really stupid thing's and wich will have to solve it's issue's, but it's not that high a concern for many company's, especially the big rich ones. The energy crisis is a fundamental problem however, and our economy's will for the next years probably concentrate on energy effeciancy, energy independancy and exploitation of new energy sources. Hence why the energy sector is doing much better than the rest, because the really important factor in what is changing our economy's is energy costs.

As to youre point of local changes, that hardly matters. many local places had shabby economic prospects even during bull years, that didn't make it a recession neither.