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Recession Ledger

An independent record of the downturn that began in 2008 and the years after it. Every forecast here is dated, and checked at the foot of its page.

Subject

All essays

The whole record, by year.

Each essay keeps its original date and address. Where the argument has since been tested, a later note at the foot of the page says how it came out. Nothing is rewritten to look wiser than it was.

38 essays, 2012–2026

20261 essay

  1. When the bank says no: what a downturn does to the smallest firms' credit, and who answers

20233 essays

  1. Fedbucks coming to a theatre near you this summer: FedNow, the SVB editorial, and a catalogue of recent Fed flops

  2. The mad men of artificial intelligence: developers claim their creation verges on the godlike

  3. What a day: the 'non-systemic' collapse deepened systemically as the Fed's balance sheet jumped with 'not-QE'

202214 essays

  1. Fed up and under-fed at the same time: tightening a labour market that is short of people

  2. Cashless-society talk goes mainstream in a hurry, and should be trusted about as far as the NSA

  3. The money of the apocalypse: the New York Fed's digital-dollar pilot, announced the week FTX collapsed

  4. A recessional for the recession: everyone sings the strong-labour-market tune in unison, and the tune is wrong

  5. Real GDP says: get real. The second negative quarter of 2022 and the consumer who was never strong

  6. An apocalypse upon us: how much more can one summer take?

  7. The inflation monster: it is worse than we thought, and it has not grown up yet

  8. The retail apocalypse was bloodier than it looked

  9. US economy crashes into recession: the first-quarter 2022 GDP report

  10. The Federal Reserve crashes the plane en route to a soft landing

  11. The relentless march of inflation to the drumbeats of war

  12. Seeing it all come together: bonds, the yield curve and the end of the Fed's taper

  13. Federal job fakery hits peak balderdash: the January 2022 payrolls report

  14. The next recession is here: reading the fourth-quarter 2021 GDP report under the hood

20211 essay

  1. The tax-and-vaccinate plan may be the straw that breaks the camel's back: shortages, ports and stagflation in September 2021

20203 essays

  1. The coronacrisis turns the buyback billionaires into the trillion-dollar dozen

  2. Cashless society 2020: how the coronavirus swung the public toward touch-free money, digital ID and a digital dollar

  3. Digital ID, vaccination certificates and the cashless argument: what was actually proposed in 2020

20191 essay

  1. Bond primer: does an inverted yield curve indicate a recession?

20181 essay

  1. It's up, it's down, it's done: a day in the year of the Dow

20176 essays

  1. Central banks buying stocks: how the Swiss and Japanese central banks came to own the American market

  2. A list of seven troubles assailing the US economy heading into summer 2017

  3. 2017 economic headwinds: housing bubbles popping up, and popping, everywhere

  4. The inevitability of economic collapse: the flaws that were not fixed after 2008

  5. More fake news: how honest photographs were used to shrink an inauguration crowd

  6. Fake news: the establishment media devours itself over the dossier

20166 essays

  1. Wikileaks and Syria: what the Clinton email archive said about Libya, Iran and Israel

  2. This graph says it all: the 2016 recession was already here

  3. What was going on with banks in April 2016: emergency meetings, a bail-in and the worst quarter since 2009

  4. The cashless-society war intensifies: the record of 2015 and 2016, country by country

  5. 2016 economic predictions: the year of the Epocalypse

  6. A Fed official confesses: the Fed front-loaded the stock rally, and a correction is coming

20122 essays

  1. An idiot's guide to quantitative easing: what QE is, how it works, and why bad news became good news

  2. Deficits, debts and Democrats versus Republicans: the US national debt by year and by president