Last fall the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the recession officially ended in June 2009, at the same time defining a recession as the period until the economy reaches its low point. From the perspective of the business aviation industry in the subsequent 19 months, that low point hasn’t moved much. The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent in December, which was welcome news. But two weeks later, on January 14, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 0.5-percent increase in consumer prices and a drop in real average hourly earnings of 0.4 percent for the month of December. And even as Goldman Sachs was forecasting “substantial acceleration in real GDP growth over the next two years to a four-percent pace by early/mid-2012,” the news came that in 2010, for the first time in a single year, banks had seized more than a million homes.
The recession might be officially over, but there’s plenty of depression to go around in the business aviation industry.
