This town, which has suffered over various recessions, had real economic difficulties, deindustrialisation, in the seventies and eighties, hit us hard as a town.
Blame whoever you like for the demise of manufacturing – dopey bosses not checking their rearviews for the foreign competition, the three recessions of Thatcher and Major, New Labour writing off industry to chase the mirage of a "knowledge economy" – the outcome has been a manmade disaster.
In the past, the tendency has been for the public finances to deteriorate rapidly in recessions and bounce back even more smartly than forecast during recoveries.
Writing in today's FT, Pollin and Ash are careful to say this disproof doesn't mean governments can borrow "profligately", but "judicious deficit spending remains the single most effective tool we have to fight against mass unemployment caused by severe recessions".
Apart from the odd high-street name such as Woolies or Comet, there have been no great business bankruptcies – partly because Britain has so few big industrial employers left after the Thatcher and Major recessions.
Disease control, global recessions and climate change are all global obstacles, which can only be tackled with a global commitment between countries.
The government is under pressure to agree to more cuts and reforms to secure the funding, but Athens opposes measures that it says make the situation worse by preventing recovery from one of the deepest recessions in modern times.
AMV did not cut staff in recessions.
But there's also a deep, widespread, continuing mistrust of the Keynesian model for ending severe, prolonged recessions by using government spending to correct systemic shortages of demand.
But this pattern began to shift in the recovery from Paul Volcker's disinflationary recessions of the early 1980s.
The main reason youth unemployment has soared in southern Europe is the depth of the recessions in those countries.
