Recessions, like unhappy families, are each painful in their own way.
And the next one — which economists see as increasingly possible by the end of next year — will probably bear that out. A U.S. downturn may well be modest, but it might also be long.
Many observers expect any decline to be a lot less wrenching than the 2007-09 Great Financial Crisis and the back-to-back downturns seen in the 1980s, when inflation was last this high. The economy is simply not as far out of whack as it was in those earlier periods, they say.
