With the news this week that the recession officially ended in June 2009, there?s a ton of commentary about how it still feels like we?re in recession. But from where I sit, it never felt much like a recession at all. Revenues tightened up and people didn?t get raises, but I don?t know any friends who lost apartments, few who lost jobs and few companies that went under, just because of the crash.
Compare that to the post-2000 crash, when I?d estimate that half of my friends in the Bay Area were laid off and out of work for months or in some cases, years. I may sound like those old grandmas who insists on rinsing and reusing paper towels because they never got over the Great Depression, but honestly, that was a recession. This thing we just went through? From the Valley standpoint it was an excuse to trim fat and put some decisions off.
This should seem obvious-- after all we?d been built up to a crazy level in the late 1990s, propped up by IPOs that weren?t sustainable. But somehow I keep finding myself in this debate-- including in China at the World Economic Forum last week-- and the broader business press keeps projecting that this was "the big one" when for a lot of us out here, it just wasn't.
Well, I?m tired of having the debate, so I spent the afternoon digging up some stats to back up my anecdotal sense of things. Spoiler alert: I was right.
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