Advertising folks will tell you that repetition is the key to getting an idea stuck in your head. Summer camp and Hollywood will tell you that saying something at least three times (preferably at midnight, while looking in a mirror) will make boogeymen real. Which made me think this morning, as I brushed my teeth, wasn't it only a few months ago that analysts were making fun of the few lone analysts who predicted we were heading into a recession?

According to the Google search trend analyzer, yes, yes it was. Way back in the summer of 2004, no one in the U.S. was even thinking about a recession. Now the panic is building, particularly in DC, California, and New York, none of whom have yet cast their primary ballots. According to yesterday's NYT:

“The question is not whether we will have a recession, but how deep and prolonged it will be,” said David Rosenberg, the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch.

If belief makes it so, then the recession is upon us. Time to start squirrelling away funds for conservation, or perhaps using the recession to drive better environmental innovations.