The great bailout has not had the same kind of cultural resonance as previous national downturns.
It has also served as a built-in stabiliser of the economy during downturns.
If past downturns are a guide, a substantial number of Americans will head to Vegas rather than taking expensive holidays abroad, says David Schwartz of the Centre for Gaming Research.
Until the Lehman failure the recession was pretty typical of the modest downturns of the post-war period.
Some allow for downturns or exclude investment from the numbers.
In other words, the amateurs are better at forecasting downturns than the experts (see chart).This may be because the consumer surveys interview people with a wide range of backgrounds and from many different locations, whereas investment strategists are a tightly knit group, and may accordingly suffer from a herd mentality.
Recent downturns in the euro area and Britain seem like minor hiccups in comparison.
But philosophers, and other professors in the humanities, struggle to convince the world otherwise.In previous downturns the number of students studying humanities decreased.
A rule that calls for budgets to be balanced over the medium term, permitting bigger deficits during downturns and requiring correspondingly bigger surpluses in upturns, would make far better sense than the stability pact.Note however that this calls for little if anything by way of "co-ordination".
The jobless rate as a share of all aged 16-24 is 13%, a bit less scary if hardly comforting.Young workers everywhere are vulnerable to downturns because they have fewer skills and are more likely to be on temporary contracts than prime-age workers.
During the 20th century, these two firms handled the legal work that underpinned the construction of such tangible marvels as the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge.It is not supposed to be like this for lawyers, even during the worst of downturns.
