I only hear about the "Panic of 1837" or "Panic of 1893", but never about the "Panic of 1982" or "Panic of 2008". Does an economic panic have a meaning distinct from a recession? If so, is there a reason why there hasn't been a classic panic in over a century? Or is it a historiographical anachronism, a designation that hinges on context but is otherwise devoid of intrinsic importance? This is all from a U.S. perspective.
A panic is a financial crisis, in which people lose confidence in the banks and withdraw their money to hold in cash, rendering banks unstable. A recession is a period of reduced (below-trend) economic activity—that is, businesses can't run a profit that satisfies them, they lower prices and still can't profit, they lay people off; producers therefore have less reason to produce, and they lay people off; all those layoffs mean people aren't buying as much, hence, reduced economic activity ... etc.
A panic usually lasts until people regain confidence in the banks. A recession usually lasts until, with lower prices, people see opportunities to profit by spending resources to generate economic activity.
The two can be related and often are. A panic, with lots of bank withdrawals, leads to fewer resources for banks to lend. Less lending means less business activity which means a recession.
The U.S. hasn't really had bank panics since the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933. So the term has fallen out of use for that reason. The crisis of 2008 was mostly prevented from becoming a panic by the FDIC and the Federal Reserve.
I’ll just add on a tangent that even now, less than half the populace is invested in the stock market. Certainly things they own can be affected by panics (jobs, property values, etc), but for the common American, they owned no stock that was affected by the panic.
And the stock market isn’t the economy. The stock market is a secondary market to trade shares of companies that is primarily interested in increasing value for shareholders such that ceos and investors get a profitable return. Investors not finding value in the stock market will look for value elsewhere, like bonds, commodities, futures, property, etc.
That is to say, panics generally affect a wealthy segment of the population and are generalized to the entire population.
And when using a long view, which historians should do, the 2008 recession was followed by the greatest bull market in history. Those who did panic lost money. But the wealthy who just held their shares or bought at a discount have more than doubled their wealth in ten years.
So, whose “panic” is the real question.