So, we’re in a recession.  We’ve been in recessions before.  We know what a recession is, definitionally, but that doesn’t really give us any idea of why we have them.  What are the causes of economic recession?

Quite frankly, the answer to that question will depend upon who you ask!

David Cornish blames unrestrained capitalism and exessive greed.

Gaynor Borade sees a link between oil price spikes and the onset of recession.

Tejvan Pettinger argues that tight fiscal policy and fast, unsustainable growth have both led to recession in the past.

Stormy Brain explains why so many people are happy to blame the Fed for recessions.

A Washington University news article maintains that experts blame excessive consumer debt for our current economic downturn.

Love a Recession has three lists of potential causes.  The “mainstream” outlook, the authors personal opinion and other potential causes.  The range from speculation to underwhelming consumer confidence to Satan.  Take your pick, right?

Love to Know has an article with the title, “Causes of Economic Recession” that doesn’t even bother to list a single potential cause of recession.  Instead, it maintains that it’s “difficult to predict the causes of economic recession”. 

Another vote for high oil prices in this video.

How about government spending overseas, inflation and the fear of a recession.  Maybe FDR was onto something with that “the only thing we have to fear…” thing, huh?

Those crazy kids who don’t mind being associated with Lew Rockwell blame excessive government regulation.  No.  Really.

Are you getting the gist of this yet?  NO ONE REALLY KNOWS WHAT CAUSES A RECESSION.

That doesn’t stop them, however, from pretending as if they do have an answer.  Not so coincidentally, the causes they uncover are often linked to specific governmental programs of which they don’t approve on other grounds, too.  

In other words, if someone tells you that George Bush caused the recession, that someone probably doesn’t have a “W” bumper sticker.  

If someone tells you that the recession is a direct results of government policies designed to promote minority home ownership via subprime lending, you can probably guess how they’d feel about that policy even if we weren’t in a recession.

For every so many people who blame deregulation for the recession, there is at least one person out there who will take the contrarian view that regulation caused it.  

As far as I’m concerned, you can spin the wheel and embrace whichever pet “cause” it stops on, because your causal analysis isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans anyway.  

The more important consideration at the moment is the fact that we’re in a recession and we might wanna think about how to get out of it before too many more people end up losing their jobs and/or homes.

Which is why I’m proposing the Big Omnibus Recession Elimination Solution (BORES).  Basically, it boils down to developing alternate energy sources to reduce the price of foreign oil and our exposure to price spikes while we engage in less restrictive monetary policy and encourage increased consumer spending (but not debt).  We do this while cutting foreign aid to our allies and banning speculative stock trading.  We’ll deregulate all business by drafting better regulations that will make us more recession-resistant, even though we’ll recognize the inevitability of recessions as part of the business cycle.  Oh, we also need to find a way to defeat Satan.

That’s BORES.  And that’s what you end up with if you start believing the various single (or even “one or two”) issue explanations of the underlying causes of economic recession.