Jim O’Neill, the former chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister, thinks a global recession could well be upon us. And more than half the Wall Street professionals reckon the Federal Reserve’s bid to combat inflation by hiking interest rates will spark a recession, says CNBC.

But the definition of recession describes a comparatively tame affair: it requires at least six consecutive months in which the economy shrinks. Even the so-called Great Recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — resulted in just a 4.3% decline in US GDP. ..