With proper monetary policy, there is no reason to expect it would cause a recession in America. The reason people in the business press are concerned about it is because deflation is associated with recessions. But usually recessions are caused by demand-driven deflation (people demanding less goods, which leads to the prices of goods decreasing), while this is a supply-side deflation (suppliers providing more goods, which leads to prices decreasing). As you can imagine, when people demand less, fewer goods are created, which is a recession, but if people are given more for the same price, MORE goods are created, which is not a recession.<p>Scenarios where a fall in the price of oil triggers a recession are possible. For example, with bad monetary policy from the Fed you can always get a recession if they do the wrong thing, and drastic changes in oil prices could make that more likely by leading us into a more volatile environment, where past trends could be broken. More likely is that it could lead to deflation in the Eurozone, and since the European Central Bank isn&#x27;t very good at monetary policy, it could lead to a further Eurozone recession because of sticky wages. If that recession were bad enough it could cause failure of the economies of one or more European countries and trigger global recession.<p>It&#x27;s also possible that one or more oil-exporting nations could default on their sovereign debt (Russia, Venezuela), which could cause a panic-driven global recession.