The Great Recession Blog

As noted in my last article, “Fed Loses Control of its Benchmark Interest,” bank liquidity strains are written all over this month’s troubles. Some may find that hard to believe because there is so much hot air (fiat money) still floating the system from a historical standpoint. There is a sound fundamental reason, however, that […]

One argument for last week’s extraordinary plunge in bond prices, which I explored as something that might happen this time of year in one of my earlier Premium Posts, was that bond prices could get crushed by the supersized US treasury auctions planned for September and October as the government makes up for its inability […]

Pretty good if you ask me. Most economic indicators this year have moved relentlessly in the direction of recession, and now the Cass Freight Index is saying a US recession may start in the 3rd quarter, fitting up nicely to my prediction that we would be entering recession this summer.

Let me help remove the rose-colored glasses for anyone who still thinks GDP this year is good.  First, GDP growth in the first quarter was not “great” as I’ve heard some claiming. It was, by US historical standards, a little lower than mediocre. Second, the biggest tax cuts in history only got us down to […]

This month the economic expansion brought to you by your Federal Reserve and by US government largess becomes the longest expansion in the history of the United States! That’s something, right? Something? Let’s take an honest look at what we now call great.

We live in a time of intense scrutiny and declining trust in public institutions around the world. At the Fed, we are committed to working hard to build and sustain the public’s trust. The Fed has special responsibilities in this regard. Our monetary policy independence allows us to serve the public without regard to short-term […]

Laughable Larry Kudlow, as high priest of the Laffer Curve, has long been servant of “King Dollar,” as Larry has often reverently referred to US currency. The Laffer Curve is the central creed of trickle-down economics. It’s a bell-curve that demonstrates how lowering tax rates actually increases tax revenue to a certain point by stimulating […]

Bears, like myself, picked the meat off market bulls throughout 2018. We scoffed at the start of the year when bulls concocted a narrative that said bears would starve because 2018 was going to be the year of “global synchronize growth.” We bears bawled that this was euphoric nonsense. Global economies fell off a cliff […]

We are in the end time of an unprecedented era of financial expansion — the greatest expansion of the world’s money supply ever attempted, expansion of the Federal Reserve’s vast and unchecked powers far beyond what the Fed could do before the financial crisis, and super-sizing expansion of banks that were already way too big […]

(This Premium Post, available to patrons who support this site at $5 or more per month, explains how the Great Recovery Rewind works, how it impacts interest rates, and how it may be monetizing the US government debt. It can be opened here with the password provided to Premium Post Patrons or in my posts […]

I bet my blog on a stock market crash in the early summer and on global economic cracks large enough by summer that no one could reasonably deny the economy is in a serious downturn. I have both lost and won that bet as I will lay out here.

It is widely believed that World War II gave us the end of the Great Depression. As a result, people have said for decades there is nothing like a wartime economy to bring recovery from economic recession. War blows apart a lot of things, so you have to make a lot of things, which puts […]