The economy: Google News and the ‘D’ word

Several weeks ago, around the time Bear Stearns collapsed, I started checking in on Google News to see how often the word “depression” was popping up in media accounts. I added the word “economy” to the string to cull most of the references to depression in the clinical sense.

Checking news databases to measure the state of the economy is an analytic ploy I stole from Doug Henwood, the distinguished economics writer and publisher of Left Business Observer. Doug in turn swiped it from the UK magazine The Economist, whose editors discovered that rising press references to “recession” were in fact a good predictive tool for marking the onset of recessions.

The results? In mid-March when I started looking, there were typically 5,000-6,000 Google News matches for “depression” and “economy” on a given day. By the first week of April, the number broke through the 9,000-mention threshold. Today, as you can see, the count is hovering around 11,500.

Where it stops, nobody knows. But speaking of Henwood, here are a couple of essays he’s posted at the LBO site that are well worth your time: a February primer on the credit crunch’s roots in the subprime meltdown, and a follow-up from March that was composed shortly after Bear Stearns’ fall.