What makes a recession a depression? And what constitutes a recession in the first place? Unfortunately, there's no simple answer. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has declared a dozen ...

If you lived through the 2008 recession, you know how painful recessions can be. Even if you didn’t personally lose your job or home, you likely knew more than one person who did. The effects of that ...

As far as economic events go, true depressions are rare. Over the last century, the Great Depression of the 1930s was the only economic downturn in the U.S. that earned the distinction of being ...

Ian Bremmer is a foreign affairs columnist and editor-at-large at TIME. He is the president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing ...