THE FEDEX ECONOMY and the micro-recessions; a fascinating piece at the New York Times:

The nearly empty Airbus 310 was coasting through the Alabama night sky when a message flashed in the cockpit. "DIVERT," it said, before using code to order the plane to land in Atlanta.

The pilot banked the jet to the east and a half-hour later it was on the ground. There, its cargo door opened up to a group of waiting FedEx employees who began filling it with 17,000 pounds of cargo.

It had been a busy day for Georgia businesses, and FedEx's regular nightly flights from Atlanta to the company's Memphis hub were overbooked with packages. So the local crew made a call to a sprawling, low-slung room here at headquarters, where people hunch over computer screens showing weather maps and flight plans, and asked for help from the five empty FedEx jets that roam over the United States every night.

The recent birth of that small fleet, at a multimillion-dollar price tag, explains a lot about how the nation's economy has become so much more resilient. Think of it as the FedEx economy, a system that constantly recalibrates itself to cope with surprises.

The United States has endured an almost biblical series of calamities in recent years - wars, hurricanes, financial scandals, soaring oil prices and rising interest rates - but the economy keeps chugging along at an annual growth rate of roughly 3 percent.

It has been able to do so with the help of technology that allows businesses to react ever more quickly to changes. But with little notice, those reactions have also created a new feature of the business cycle: the micro-recession.

When one of them strikes, activity slows for a few weeks, sometimes in just certain sectors or regions, as companies adjust to a dip in demand. It has happened much more often in the last few years than in earlier expansions, but growth has picked up each time, thanks in part to the adjustments that businesses have made.

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