This is Planet Money from NPR.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

It is October 31st, 2019 Halloween.

And to celebrate we wanted to call the scariest economist we could find.

We found Professor Todd Newp of Cornell College.

Hello.

Todd, can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Professor, do you mind turning that music down real quick?

Okay, let me yell at my teenager.

Hold on.

I'm gonna start out.

Professor Newp is the perfect Halloween guest because he is an expert on real life monsters.

The kind that can take away your money, your job, your future, he wrote the book, recessions

and depressions.

The strange thing about a recession or a depression, Newp says, is that not only is it the bogeyman,

something we fear, but you can make an argument that recessions are in fact created by that

very same fear.

The fear that something bad could be lurking around the corner and we don't know what it

is.

So to be safe, I stop spending, I stop blending and without that consumption and investment

in the economy, demand starts to fall, production overall starts to fall.

...