The Great Recession
Scott Paeth2012, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal
The paroxysms of economic pain through which the world has been suffering for the past four years offer any number of possible vectors for analysis-from economic theory, to public policy, to sociology, to international affairs. An examination of the economic crisis through any of these lenses would reveal a great deal both about how we've come to be here, and how we might (or might not) find our way out of it. The "Great Recession" is almost unique in modern political economics: a largescale, catastrophic global economic meltdown, which may well persist for some time to come. 1 There have, of course, been other economic crises, recessions of greater or lesser duration, as well as global crises, such as the so-called "Asian Flu" of the mid-1990s, but the Great Recession has come to be so named because its impact has been unlike anything the world has experienced since the 1930s (see Krugman 2008; Reich 2010; Stiglitz 2010). And given the increasingly interconnected and codependent nature of the global economic system, the negative effects of this downturn are affecting a much greater proportion of the world's population than the Great Depression. The reverberations continue, as we see in the ongoing European financial crisis; but the epicenter of the earthquake, in September of 2008, was the result of a conscious set of
