It is the senseless things of this world that sometimes knock sense into the high and mighty whose hubris causes them to believe they cannot fall. In this case, the tiny COVID-19 virus (coronavirus) is bringing down a global house of cards long perched to fall — locks, stocks, and barrels of oil.
The public is always ready to panic over the next pandemic. We love a good movie like the old Ebola scare, Outbreak. We even have a name for the next mystery disease — the big one that is supposed to destroy us all like World War III or like the apocalypse — a scientific name. […]
Who says there is no recession anywhere in sight? It depends on where you are looking. In short, manufacturing remains in recession; corporate profits remain in recession; freight remains deep in recession; Carmageddon remains in recession; and the Retail Apocalypse remains a recession for brick-and-mortar stores, while employment — the last holdout — is now […]
Employment has been the one stickler in my recession prediction for 2019, and finding a trustworthy measurement from the government’s statistics is like finding a virgin in a brothel. Depending on which official figures you look at, employment has refused to fall and new jobs are strong … or they stink.
During its brief and utterly failed attempt to reduce its balance sheet (called quantitative tightening), the Federal Reserve only rolled off securities at a rate of $50 billion a month. It is now purchasing US treasuries at a rate of more than $55 billion a month:
![John Robert Charlton [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]](http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/Monster-of-the-Deep-109x150.jpg)
There is, at least, one highly recognized economist who agrees with me that a recession started forming in the summer of 2019 and is still emerging, in spite of the Fed’s strongest efforts to stop it — David Rosenberg: We recall all too well the euphoria that followed the early 2001 and late 2007 Fed […]
![Zombie economists bring on US 2016 recession. (Photo by Charlie Llewellin (Flickr: Occupy Austin) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)](http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/Zombie-Epocalypse-Brains-Needed-100x150.jpg)
Dems will process you like a Cuisinart. Demonizing Democrats and reviling Republicans is as easy as shooting fish in a gun barrel. Democrats are so addicted to process, they can’t get anything done because they spend twenty years arguing about what to do, rather than doing it. That’s why they have caucuses, instead of primaries. […]
The best time to size up the collapse in housing that I called almost two years ago will be when it is over — so we can visualize its full extent. Since it is now over by some measures, though not by others, this might be as good as we get for awhile as a […]
Having predicted last year that a recession would begin in the summer of 2019 and that it would likely start with a major repo crisis, I am now proven wrong by 2019’s fourth-quarter GDP. If the repo crisis that started in the final week of summer had actually been the start of a recession, we […]
My last Patron Post pulls together a couple of major revelations by piecing together a report from the Bank for International Settlements, a couple of fascinating exposès by Zero Hedge, and a recent document from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to reveal the actual close call with catastrophic failure that lay deep at […]
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I’m not going to predict when and how the US stock market will crash as I did by laying out the stages of its fall for 2018. That was easy, but the times are different now. Back then, the Fed had laid out a precise schedule for its tightening, and it was apparent to me […]
Since hindsight is 2020, I thought it might be useful now that we are far past the time in 2018 when I called the fall of the US housing market to assess where its journey went during the year and a half that has gone by before I venture a housing market prediction for 2020.
![Larry Kudlow by Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/Larry_Kudlow-114x150.jpg)
National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, a top economic adviser to President Donald Trump, said Wednesday that the White House plans to unveil a plan for additional tax cuts later in 2020. “I am still running a process of Tax Cuts 2.0. We’re many months away – it’ll come out sometime later during the campaign,” […]
