The pains caused by an economic downturn can be excruciating, which is why most of us dread it.
A recession can mean massive layoffs, jobs becoming harder to find, and wages frozen, which means consumers hunker down and spend less-- often worsening the slowdown unknowingly.
For most businesses, especially small businesses, recessions can be brutal. Just take, for example, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) that struck the world in 2008. Between December 2008 and December 2010, approximately 1.8 million small businesses shut down. When Investopedia looked into the financial crisis's impact on small businesses after a decade, they found out that business creation has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels.
