That looks like one long recession to me

There's a splendid interactive chart at the BBC showing how long it took GDP to recover after the five longest/deepest recessions since 1930. The previous four depressions (defined loosely as 'the time it takes for the economy to get back to where it started') lasted forty to fifty months, this time there is no end in sight.

Which is hardly surprising, we have just had the biggest global credit-land price bubble ever and it will take correspondingly long to sort out.

But look a bit more closely, according to the chart the previous three depressions were 1973 - 76, 1979 - 83 and 1990 - 93. The first and last ones were clearly also the results of credit-land price boom busts (the starting dates correlate nicely with peaks in house prices*), the middle one was just a general mess, but isn't that really just one long depression, from 1973 all the way to 1993, with a six or seven year Lawson boom in the late 1980s which came to nought?

That's certainly how I remember it when I was growing up.* There was a house price peak in 1948, but this was the result of a genuine short-term post-war housing shortage and not the result of a credit bubble. This was sorted out by actually building houses, which is good for the economy, which is why there was no recession thereafter, even though it would fit nicely into the 18-year cycle, i.e. 1930 + 18 = 1948.