Every time there is a recession the uber bears call for the end of the world as we know it.
One of my favorites is from the early 90's - a wildly popular book was "The Great Reckoning: Protect Yourself in the Coming Depression
By James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg". As I recall, the book predicted that the Nikkei would fall to 16,000 and as a result we would all revert back to the cave man days. It was just as popular to predict depression then as it is today.
Well the Nikkei did fall to 16,000 - it fell to the 6,000 range eventually - and we had a terrific boom market for many years.