Recession's Second Act Would Be Worse Than The First

Fresh evidence of a global economic slowdown has raised fears that governments around the world may be powerless to reverse it. If the world does fall into back into recession, it could be much harder to escape than the contraction that ended in 2009.

With banks still recovering from a decade-long credit bubble, governments slashing spending to cope with unsustainable debt, and unemployment at levels not seen in decades, a new recession would be “disastrous,” according to Roger Altman, a senior Treasury official in the Clinton administration.

“We could be in for a repeat of the experience of 1937, when America fell back into recession after three years of recovery from the Great Depression,” he wrote in the Financial Times.

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