Typically, US recessions have featured downturns in household spending, with housing and consumer durables being the most severely affected, and with business spending on capital goods playing a secondary and generally reactive role.
In the recent episode, by contrast, business fixed investment began to weaken well before the official peak of the business cycle, contracting in real terms from the fourth quarter of 2000 through the third quarter of last year. In an arithmetic sense at least, this decline in investment accounted for a very substantial part of the general economic slowdown of the past few years.