The Economist weekly builds the so-called ‘R-word index’ (R word index) as an indirect way to measure the level of pessimism (or optimism) of economic actors based on the number of times the word appears ‘recession’ (recession) on the pages of newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post quarterly. He called it the ‘R-word’ to avoid mentioning the unmentionable word as much as possible, whose recent mention caused alarm and consternation (so much so that advisers to former President James Carter jokingly chose to say ‘banana’ instead of ‘recession’) ).

Words starting with R have returned in recent days to the economics pages of newspapers after GDP decline in Germany in the fourth quarter of 2022 and early 2023. It has also returned due Federal Reserves The US is now predicting a “mild recession” in the second half of this year for the US economy. Moreover, although the IMF has said in recent days that, contrary to its forecasts in April, it great Britain is not going to enter a recession in 2023, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the impact on British economy stop rate increases a inflation April was still 8.7% (7% in the euro area). Britain’s finance minister said he supports his central bank’s policies, even if a recession is imminent.

That ‘r-word’ has returned to economic information, but it must be acknowledged that, however and for now at least, there is talk of lowercase ‘r’. The Bundesbank predicts that a technical recession German that should give way to an economic pickup in the spring and, although the IMF showed growth around the zero line all year, the German economy is expected to avoid the red numbers eventually. the Fed’s expected ‘r’ United States of America it’s also lowercase and temporary. And for the rest of the European economy, like Spaniardit was hoped that everything would remain in lowercase ‘d’s, decelerations, and even these initials.