How has the recession (2008-2009) affected companies’ balance sheets?

          Everybody who is at least 5 years or older now, and lives in the United States remembers the recession of 2008-2009. The recession affected business as we know it in all of the industries that do business in or with the United States of America. A recession is two or more quarters of negative growth in Gross Domestic Product. Put more simply, a recession is decline in economic activity across the board in a given economy, in a given country.
       Ask most economists and they'll tell you that the Pharmaceutical industry is usually pretty invulnerable to economic events like a recession. However, this time around things went differently. As the Pharmaceutical industry is relying more and more on the advancement of technology into the digital age, the more and more the industry is feeling the affects from other industries involved in the production of such technological products. It's because of this that this time around in the recession, the Pharmaceutical industry was hit a little harder than in years past. Since people were scared to spend their money, the amount of funding received by the Pharmaceutical industry took a large decline. Along with this did the purchasing of commodities in everyday, household medicines. Not only this, but the luxury products made by the industry went into a huge decline as well.
         The one thing that people need to remember when any economy goes into a recession is that you can't be scared to spend your money. This is what creates the revolving door of no money being spent, and therefore deepening the recession because business' cannot make money. If people started buying commodity medicines during the recession, then the Pharmaceutical industry would have picked up, wouldn't have to lay off so many workers, and therefore people would be making money again and would not be scared to spend it. People just have to be willing to take that risk of spending their money.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/12/02/big-pharma-execs-say-recession-will-hurt-dtc-ads-were-worst-decision/

-Gabriel Resstack