shorter lasting and the cyclical downturns will last longer or will be harder to break. And the evidence of that is that if you go back over the last 30 years, since the early 1990s, the economy has only spent 42% of the time in a cyclical upturn. It's spent 58% of the time in a cyclical downturn. And the way that you can rationalize that is because the secular trends are declining. Debt levels are increasing, population growth is declining, that puts downward pressure on economic growth. Therefore, when we move to the cyclical trends, we have to approach the data with a bias that cyclical upturns will fade faster and will be shorter, cyclical downturns will last longer. Further evidence of that is that going back again to the 90s over the last three decades, cyclical upturns in economic growth have lasted 13 months on average, while cyclical downturns have lasted 18 months on average. So we have to be aware that the downturns are going to be lasting longer than the upturns because of (15/57)
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