The long road to recovery: the impact of the Great Recession on print

I found this article, this morning, on whattheythink.com. It’s a fairly long article, and here’s just the beginning of the article. After this intro, you’ll find a link to the complete article.

Commentary & Analysis

The long road to recovery: the impact of the Great Recession on print

By William Mitting
Published: March 5, 2012

When French bank BNP Paribas announced the closure of two of its off balance sheet investment vehicles on August 9 2007, few outside the world of high finance took notice. However, that event marked the first lashings of rain on Europe of a storm that over the next three years would devastate the European economy and result in the loss of tens of thousands of printing jobs across the continent.

The technical definition of a recession is two quarters of consecutive contraction of GDP (Gross Domestic Products). In reality a recession is defined by one thing: fear. Just over 12 months after BNP’s closure of its investment vehicles, the Federal Reserve and the US government took the indefensible decision to let Lehman Brothers, an investment bank that had hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime exposure on its books, fail.

Fear paralysed the global economic system. Money markets, on which many European banks relied for funding, ceased up as banks lost trust in their peers to repay the funds; banks collapsed amid the dearth of funding and European taxpayers were forced to intervene to save the global economic system from collapse. A recession like no other in living memory ensued and in its wake thousands of print companies were forced to close their doors.

The perfect storm

Of all sectors, print is perhaps hit the hardest by recessions. On one front, it is reliant on consumer confidence, GDP growth and the subsequent advertising investments made by large companies. On the other it is a manufacturing industry, reliant on bank lending to invest in equipment. For printers, the financial crisis was a perfect storm.

You can read the rest of this long, yet interesting, article by clicking on this link:

http://whattheythink.com/articles/56549-long-road-recovery-impact-great-recession-print/