Short and shallow or long and deep

The cottage industry of economists and financial journalists often comes up with post-hoc explanations for economic phenomena, using words and phrases which, after a while, lose much of their original significance. Examples last year included “yen carry trades” and “risk aversion.” Now the word “recession” has once again joined the ranks of overused and poorly defined jargon.
There does not appear to be a universally accepted definition of recession. Historically in the U.S., the end of the business cycle was called a depression or crisis. In fact, it appears the words recession and depression were largely interchangeable. Among the earliest uses of the word recession applied to the business cycle was in the Economist (1929), but after the devastation of the Great Depression in the 1930s, economists and politicians wanted to distinguish a temporary and relatively shallow decline in economic activity from the kind of collapse that occurred then.