The deepest recession since the 'Great Depression'!
Quarter million job losses in private sector in the month of November in US!
In India Over 65K people lose jobs in 3 months, with more job losses to follow.
Some of the world's richest become poorer by billions of dollars.
Stories of suicide, homicide, depression abound. It does seem to be all gloom and doom.
Most parts of the world including US, Europe, Japan, Singapore etc. are in the grip of a very deep recession. There are varying estimates of when this will end and economies will start growing - estimates vary from 12 months to 48 months.
However, we seem to be on a much better wicket, going by official pronouncements - 'no recession, but only slow down'.
By the by, how did this all start?
Here is a simple description of how this crisis was building up and snow balled into a monstrous situation:
Loans after about 2001 were issued to first-time homebuyers who signed up for adjustable rate mortgages they could likely never pay off, even in the best of times. Real-estate speculators, hoping to flip properties, overextended themselves, assuming that home prices would keep climbing. Those debts were wrapped in complex securities that mortgage companies and other entrepreneurial banks then sold to other banks; concerned about the stability of those securities, banks then bought a kind of insurance policy called a credit-derivative swap, which risk managers imagined would protect their investments. More than two million default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions - were reported in 2007. By then trillions of dollars were already invested in this credit-derivative market. Were those new financial instruments resilient enough to cover all the risk? (Answer: no.) A complex financial pyramid rested on a pinhead and......
How has this affected people's life style?
In Britain, sales of so called comfort foods have leapt, selling at more than double the usual rate. Britons are cheering themselves up, padding their tummies as they tighten their belts, says a Guardian report.
Credit crunch, recession, global melt down might have sent sales of most goods plummeting but there are goods that are standing up and being counted; condom sales in the UK have shot up as affected couples prefer to spend their nights within the four walls. A spokesman for one of companies said: "We've noticed a real uplift in condom sales recently".

L.Ravichandran
ravi@chennaionline.com