American commentators reckon there is a recession just around the corner. And one of the people quoted, economics professor Nouriel Roubini, believes that the financial difficulties could be greater than anything we have ever seen before.

Such prophets of doom make for great headlines, but they are forgetting one thing. All their economic models and “rules” were written in the pre-Internet days. The whole basis of much economic modelling fails to take into account the way in which the online economy works.

It’s now possible to make a living from serving miniscule niches, which were previously too expensive to reach. It’s now possible to buy products and services at the lowest possible cost – and to use price comparison and auction sites to drive prices down. Plus, for the 500,000 people recently unemployed, the costs of setting up on their own are slashed nowadays to virtually zero.

The result is that any recession in the financial world, could well take place whilst those of us in the online business world happily prosper. One thing that’s for sure is that many recessions are linked to previous talk and chatter that a recession is coming; in other words it is probably socially created, rather than financially produced. Online, the chatter is currently about success and thriving with more and more people spending record amounts on the Internet. If financial worlds are socially created, then online is likely to become a success, while the rest of the world slips into recession.