{"id":61098,"date":"2021-12-24T08:50:40","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T13:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61098"},"modified":"2021-12-24T08:50:40","modified_gmt":"2021-12-24T13:50:40","slug":"the-hidden-recession-of-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61098","title":{"rendered":"The hidden recession of 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The hidden recession of 2020<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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After 20 months of economy-wrecking lockdowns and restrictions, 2019 is fondly remembered as a period of prosperous calm.\u00a0 Memories though, are deceptive.\u00a0 And in the days before we learned what gain-of-function meant, things were not as rosy as they now seem.\u00a0 Although the decade 2009-2019 was officially one of the longest periods of economic growth ever recorded, the\u00a0rate<\/em>\u00a0of growth was anaemic \u2013 the media reporting on any quarter with more than 1.0% growth as if it heralded a return to the 1960s.\u00a0 And what growth there was owed more to additional debt than to improvements in\u00a0productivity<\/a>.\u00a0 The reality of the post-2008 years was of the mergence of an\u00a080:20 economy<\/a>\u00a0in which the majority watched their prosperity evaporate, while a shrinking metropolitan salaried class fought a rear-guard defence of their income and status.<\/p>\n

The political dam broke in 2016, with \u201cthe revenge of the places that didn\u2019t matter<\/a>\u201d \u2013 aka Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.\u00a0 But few in the salaried class understood the economic decline which had spilled over into the political arena; preferring instead to blame it all on Russian bots.\u00a0 Nevertheless, whether the elites and their salaried lapdogs chose to understand the economic situation or not, the process of decline continued.<\/p>\n

In the UK, Christmas 2018 had been the worse on record\u2026 until Christmas 2019 rolled around.\u00a0 And whereas Christmas 2018 had seen a big decline in\u00a0discretionary<\/em>\u00a0spending,\u00a0Christmas 2019<\/a>\u00a0produced the first indicators of a decline in borderline\u00a0essential<\/em>\u00a0spending too.\u00a0 We might choose to regard the humble Christmas pudding as something which can be lived without \u2013 although those who lived under\u00a0Cromwell\u2019s puritanical dictatorship<\/a>\u00a0might beg to differ \u2013 but a decline in sales \u2013 along with those of turkey and seasonal biscuits \u2013 points to a nation which was reining in its spending long before SARS-CoV-2 embarked upon the European leg of its world tour.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

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The hidden recession of 2020 After 20 months of economy-wrecking lockdowns and restrictions, 2019 is fondly remembered as a period of prosperous calm.\u00a0 Memories though, are deceptive.\u00a0 And in the days before we learned what gain-of-function meant, things were not as rosy as they now seem.\u00a0 Although the decade 2009-2019 was officially one of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[13240,196,607,1264,30640,31360],"class_list":["post-61098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","tag-13240","tag-decline","tag-pandemic","tag-recession","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61099,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61098\/revisions\/61099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}