Recessions are often described in the shapes of letters, to describe how the market recovers. Here is an easy guide to recovery shapes.
- V-shaped
- The economy suffers a sharp decline, immediately followed by a strong recovery.
- r-shaped
- The economy suffers a sharp decline, immediately followed by a strong recovery that stabilizes afterwards.
- U-shaped
- The economy suffers a sharped decline with an extended trough before recovering.
- L-shaped
- The economy drops and does not recover.
- J-shaped
- The economy initially declines but recovers to a more advantageous position. To the Moon!
- W-shaped
- The economy drops and appears to recover, before dropping again, followed by a recovery.
- A-shaped
- The market spikes before correcting. A pump-and-dump.
- N-shaped
- The economy spikes, followed by a correction, before continuing to rise.
- M-shaped
- An N-shaped economy followed by a steep correction.
- h-shaped
- The economy plummets, rallies, then continues to fall. A dead cat bounce.
- K-shaped
- Some parts of the economy recover, while other parts of the economy stagnate and decline. The economy, long united, must divide.
- C-shaped
- A reverse of the K-shaped recovery where the economy reunifies. By travelling back in time, surely. The economy, long divided, must unite.
- X-shaped
- An inverse K-shaped economy, where the fortunes of the recovering and the stagnating sectors of economy reverse. L'économie est morte! Vive la révolution!
- y-shaped
- A C-shaped economy, but forward in time in a bull market.
- Z-shaped
- We've invented time travel, but every time we go back we just make it worse.
- S-shaped
- We've invented time travel, but every time we go back we make it worse. Or better? I dunno, watch Primer.
- d-shaped
- We've rescued the market using time travel.
- g-shaped
- We thought we rescued the market with time travel, but it turned out we just made it worse.
- p-shaped
- Things were going well until we invented time travel.
- E-shaped
- We've invented a caste system.
- B-shaped
- We are altering the caste system. Pray we don't alter it any further.
- F-shaped
- We've successfully eliminated the lower class, surely nothing can go wrong now.
- T-shaped
- Things are going perfectly fine for the survivors of the apocalypse.
- O-shaped
- All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
- Q-shaped
- The economy is cyclical but some sectors have found a way to escape samsara.
- I-shaped
- The economy was a social domain that briefly existed at the dawn of civilization, before being supplanted by more ethical methods of resource management.