This recession just became a depression

This recession just became a depression

By Edmund Conway
Economics
Last updated: October 23rd, 2009

49 Comments

It is difficult to know what to be most shocked by in the gross domestic product figures published by the Office for National Statistics this morning: the fact that we are in the longest-lasting deepest continuous recession in recorded history or that no-one in the City foresaw it*.

Leaving aside the City’s failings, with which we are intimately familiar, the scale of the economic collapse is disturbing. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research has been calling this a “depressionâ€