Thanks Mark. I finally found some answers on the deflation problem, in the very stats published by the St. Louis Fed:
http://tinyurl.com/2lylec
In short, recessions aren’t deflationary at all. None of the last 9 recesssions show any decrease in consumer prices during these recessions. On the contrary, many of them saw sharp increases in consumer prices. One noticable exception in earlier recesssions is the Great Depression, but then this was accompanied by monetary contraction (so we could hardly attribute the deflation in that time period to the recession itself)…
The PPI, on the other hand, saw sharp decreases in the 1987 and 2001 recessions - although certainly not in all recessions (roughly half of them according to my count):
http://tinyurl.com/2uu5zz
This is consistent with the Austrian Theory of Business Cycles which predicts a decrease in demand (and consequently in prices) for what have been (through inflation) largely subsidized sectors of the economy concerning higher order goods, accompanied by shortfalls supply side for those lower order (consumer) goods that were penalized by that same inflation.
However, I imagine the trends in all of the “recessions” as recorded in the statistics above have been skewed by the varying ways in which the Fed reacted to economic data (sometimes being more and sometimes less vigilant about inflation and adapting their monetary policy accordingly). So each of the recesssions would need to be dealt with individually in the context of the exact monetary policy applied at the time in order to better understand the problem.
None the less, at the very least I think I can conclude that all this talk about recessions being deflationary is complete nonsense and no doubt harks back to the most severe recession in living memory which actually was accompanied by deflation, that being the Great Depression… but, as already noted, this was also accompanied by monetary contraction which on it’s own might explain the price deflation experienced at that time.