In economics, a recession is a general slowdown in economic activity over a sustained period of time, or a business cycle contraction. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way. Production as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, investment spending, capacity utilization, household incomes and business profits all fall during recessions.
During the global economic downturn from December 2007 to ????, many are referring to the recession as a derecession. A derecession can be classified as a deep recession but not fundamentally a depression. Although the term has yet to be fluently used, and accepted, in the english lexicon, as of May 22, 2009, a Google search for "derecession" found over 30 uses of the term. The first known usage of the term was by a message poster on Jan 24, 2008. The coining of this term would be comparable to the development of the word stagflation (high unemployment and high inflation) used to describe the economic turmoil during the 1970's in the United States.
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