A looming recession has already been heavily rumored in the past few months, and an economic analyst thinks that the rumors are true as the red flags that the 2008 global recession seen is once again waiving at a short distance. In fact, the United Kingdom is already in recession, he said.
David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College in the US and member of the MPC from 2006 to 2009, suggested in an article he published in the Guardian, that the United Kingdom is already in recession.
“Indicators that gave an early read to recession in 2008 are flashing red and suggest the UK is already in recession,” he wrote. “Early indicators of recession in 2008 were provided by a series of qualitative confidence surveys of business and consumers; they had all turned down sharply by spring 2008. These surveys have the benefit that they don’t get revised and are very timely. We already have data for August 2019 in some of the surveys, and they are all trending down.”
The talks about the recession have been stronger in the last few months as global events like Brexit faux-pas, and the US-China trade war has continued to put pressure on the global economy.
Business behavior also suggests that companies are already preparing for the recession even if the economy is still relatively stable as of today. Only recently, a survey revealed that more than half of the Chief Financial Officers in different companies across the United States said that they worry about the looming economic turmoil.
Duke University/CFO Global Business Outlook survey released on Wednesday that more than half (53%) of the financial executives they have surveyed said that they believed that the United States would fall into a recession in late 2020. Two-thirds of them think that the economy will have a downturn before the end of this year.
