Hmm, after Gordon’s slip of the tongue (Depression, ahh, I mean recession), we now have Obama, Ed Balls and the King jumping on the doom-bandwagon.

President Barack Obama warned Thursday that the nation is facing a recession so deep that, without action, it could turn into one that “we may not be able to reverse.”

The current global recession is “the most serious for over 100 years”, cabinet minister Ed Balls has said.
Mr Balls, a former economic adviser to Gordon Brown, said it was “more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s”, the Yorkshire Post reported.

Britain is in a “deep recession” that could get worse if efforts to save the banking system fail, Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned today.

Of course, it’s not just here that things are a little bit on the pear-shaped size.
Exporter countries like Japan are suffering too. In fact, they aren’t too happy with the Americans.

Nakagawa said he has talked about the “protectionist” provision with new U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other G7 finance ministers by phone ahead of the meeting slated for Friday and Saturday.
“I believe Buy American represents protectionism and the G7 and G20 countries have confirmed that they are against it,” he said.

“We have learned lessons from the protectionist laws at the time of the Great Depression. I’d like to confirm that point,” Nakagawa said, suggesting all members of the World Trade Organization should abide by trade liberalization rules.
Nakagawa referred to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised U.S. tariffs to historically high levels and caused a worldwide spread of protectionism.

Yikes, hope this history repeating itself doesn’t carry on like this :(