I have not been through many recessions but my memory of the last recession, the one at the beginning of the nineties was that it was very Australia focussed. This one seems to be much more of a global phenomena. But maybe that is just how your memory works.

On looking, it appears my memory is wonky. The very first line of the Wikipedia entry for the Late 1980′s Recession is:

The recession of the early nineteen-nineties was an economic recession that hit much of the world in 1990-91.

I was listening to the podcast of Thinking Allowed from the BBC, where they were discussing the coming financial crisis and the the fact that it appeared as if no economists had predicted it was coming.

One listener wrote an email into the show which was read aloud: “none of the financial types or economists seemed to predict this crisis but sociologists have very good models of how this type of behaviour comes about”. Maybe we should put the sociologists in charge of banking regulation?