The seasons, they are a-changing. I can smell it in the air. September is upon us and in the northern hemisphere the evenings are getting darker earlier. The wind has a fresh bite about it. The lazy hazy days of summer are rapidly giving way to a chill. Colder times are upon us. Unfortunately I am not just talking about the weather.

Economically too there is a slow chill descending across large parts of the developed world. The green shoots of recovery, which sprouted in the first part of this year, are now browning off, and some have downright withered in the soil.

The revision downwards of US economic growth in the second quarter to an annualised 1.6 per cent coupled with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's admission that the US economy had slowed "to a pace somewhat weaker" than the Fed had projected has rightly given cause for concern.

Economic numbers coming from the United States are worrying. Existing and new home sales numbers look like a hurricane has swept through them.

Consumer confidence data are well off their recent higher levels.

Hanging over the entire US economy is an unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at 9.5 per cent.

The only reason that number isn't higher is because of, in Bernanke's words, "reduced labour force participation".

In other words, many job seekers have given up looking for work. The European situation is no better. France has revised downwards its economic growth estimates for next year from 2.5 per cent to 2 per cent.

Ireland's debt rating has been downgraded and even the UK's better GDP numbers are the result of construction and inventory rebuild and are unlikely to survive the blast of cold budgetary air still to come this winter.

Only Germany motors on with second quarter growth of 2.2 per cent powered by rising exports. But even Germany will falter if its major export markets start to stagnate. The EU Economics Commissioner Olli Rehn's recent description of the recovery as "robust", might be on the optimistic side. The reality of this transatlantic recovery is starting to become all too clear.

Quasi recovery

As Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman puts it in the New York Times "this isn't a recovery in any sense that matters." Yes the numbers may show that the developed economies are growing, but to ordinary people, other than the statisticians, it will feel like we are still stuck in what Alan Greenspan recently called a "quasi recovery."

All of this wouldn't matter too much if the outlook were rosy; but it isn't. All the major economies in the Northern Hemisphere are introducing tremendous austerity measures to drive down deficits.

Tune in to CNN International each weekday at 2200 UAE time to catch Richard's show, Quest Means Business.