What does our collective gut tell us about this issue ?
economist.com
QUOTE
The recession index
Don’t mention that word
Jun 28th 2001
From The Economist print edition
Top American and German newspapers are writing less about recession
STOP fretting about recession. That is the message from America’s R-word index. For each quarter, we count how many stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post include the word “recession”. Alarm bells were set off by the sharp jump in the “R-count” in the first quarter of this year, at a rate that in the past has signalled the start of a recession. In the second quarter, however, the number of articles fell by more than one-third. A conspiracy theorist might suggest that newspaper editors, worried about dwindling advertising revenues, have banned the R-word.
The Economist has found that over the past two decades, the R-word index has been good at spotting turning-points in the American economy. Unlike GDP figures which appear only after a lag, the numbers are instantly available. But how does the index perform in Germany, where there have also been growing fears of recession? Using our idea, HypoVereinsbank has constructed an R-word index for Germany, counting the number of times the word rezession appears in Handelsblatt.
Worryingly, Germany’s R-count for the first quarter of 2001 showed the second-steepest rise in the past two decades. But in the second quarter, the index dropped by one-third, as in America. Either the world economy has nothing to worry about, or journalists are more worried about a depression than a mere recession. A D-word index?
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