It was five years ago this week that the wheels came off the global economy. As we all vividly remember, the U.S. government bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sent the Dow into a tailspin unlike anything we had seen in decades. The historic Great Recession was officially under way.
Technically the recession started in December 2007, but it wasn’t until September 2008 that the global economy was hit by a particularly sharp and long-lasting downturn. Before that time the heads of all the major aircraft manufacturers from Cessna to Bombardier to Dassault and Hawker Beech talked about a “soft landing” for business aviation. They simply couldn’t imagine that an industry in the midst of it’s best runup ever could transition from boom to bust overnight.
