COMMENT: Better to suffer now than in the long term.

Daniel Ben-Ami, Editor

Last week saw the publication of some of the scariest numbers so far in this recession. Britain suffered its worst quarterly fall in GDP since 1958: a year when Harold Macmillan was prime minister and the Soviet Union launched a Sputnik satellite into space. The 2.4% fall in the first quarter of 2009 was equivalent to about 10% at an annual rate.

In America the unemployment rate hit its highest level since 1983: when the American embassy in Beirut was bombed and Michael Jackson first performed the "Moonwalk". Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, has estimated America has lost 6.5m jobs since the start of this recession.

To make matters worse Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of the state of California, declared a state of fiscal emergency in his state. The fiscal plight of the American states adds to the ballooning of federal debt discussed in this week's cover story.

Under such circumstances it is not surprising that Stuart Thomson, the economist at Ignis, talks of a "WWW recovery". He is not referring to the internet but to the pattern of apparent recovery followed by a decline back into the mire.

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