There is a lot of talk and coverage from the media the last few months about the current financial problems the US economy is facing that threatens to drag the whole world into a global recession. But what will be the consequences of that crisis to the MLM industry?

Actually, the MLM network marketing industry is to benefit from all this turmoil for many reasons whether we dive into a recession or hopefully manage to avoid it. First let us take the worst case scenario that we do get into a recession or even a depression.

In that case, many corporations will start lay offs in a big scale and many people will find themselves unemployed, while others under reduced salary. Such things could lead to an increase in the people who are looking for opportunities in order to start a home based business and supplement their income. Of course the great increase won't come for those who lost their job, as they would be desperately looking for a new job to survive, but from the rest. It would come from people who will keep their jobs, but would keep feeling a constant threat that their job is the next in the line if another round of lay offs would happen. Probably a percentage of them would be working under reduced salary, so they would have another incentive to start looking for alternatives to supplement their income, as probably their paycheck wouldn't suffice.

Many MLM opportunities are poised to benefit from that influx of new members and many distributors would manage to fill their downlines fast and build networks that would give them passive income in the years to come.

But even if we hopefully manage to avoid a crisis and things would go back to normal, many people took their lesson from what little we have experienced till now. While not in a big scale we still had lay offs, and many people saw their investments in the stock market falling. Investments that were supposed to provide for them when they reach the age of retirement. Add to that that the decline in the house prices hurt a lot of people that were relying on the increasing value of their homes in order to draw equity from them through refinancing to cover a part of their expenses, and you realize how hard people were hit.

Under all this, it is natural that many people learned how dangerous is when you rely on others for your economic future and are going to seek for alternatives. Alternatives like having and running your own home based business instead of relying exclusively to employment for a source of income. And of course a percentage of them will get into MLM as it is offering many advantages that is very difficult to be found in other business models.