The Great Recession Blog

As happened with the first housing market crash that began in 2007 but didn’t become widely recognized until mid-2008, the present housing crisis began exploding one story at a time last summer, and this blog was perhaps the first to state that summer’s change was the turning point from decades of ascent into a collapse […]

A summer storm is gathering against the housing market all across the US. More than a year ago, I predicted the collapse of Housing Bubble 2.0 and then predicted as soon as the housing market collapse had begun that it would see temporary reprieve until the summer of 2018. Well, that reprieve has ended … 

In fact, I knew what the economy did last summer before summer even began. Since the beginning of the year, I have been writing that it appeared housing was reaching a new bubblicious peak and that the real estate market was getting ready to roll over. Just before the start of the summer, I confirmed that […]

The following is not simply a list of negative risks to the economy but a list of of serious economic conditions that are already placing drought-like pressures on the overall economy. This list doesn’t include the long-term structural problems with the economy, such as its high debt burden, but just the forces that have risen against it this year.

Headwinds that are starting to assail deep structural flaws in the US and global economies form the basis for my 2017 economic forecast, which looks like an all-out economic crisis building throughout the world. Some of these headwinds are global; some more locally focused within the United States, but that which brings down the US economy wounds the world anyway. […]

As we enter 2017, housing bubbles are showing signs of bursting all over the world. I know I’ve been promising I would lay out the economic headwinds for 2017, but 2017’s headwinds are building so fast and furious that I’m having to break that promised article out into several articles, as I’m accumulating material faster than I have time to cover. […]

Since Trump’s election, the US stock market has climbed unstoppably along a remarkably steep path to round off at a teetering height. Is this the irrational exuberance that typically marks the last push before a perilous plunge, or is the market reaching escape velocity from the relentless gravity of the Great Recession?

The Federal Reserve is, at last, acknowledging at top levels that its economists are completely baffled, its recovery is failing, that the Fed cannot raise interest and may even have to heat up its stimulants … or we may end up with a permanently scarred and stagnant economy.

Here’s a scary chart. Over the past three years, U.S. housing prices have risen as quickly as they did when the Federal Reserve was fueling the housing bubble with cheap and easy credit. That blew up in a housing market collapse in 2007-2009. Prices are also nearing the same peak price as their earlier crash […]

Actually, these bubbles aren’t tiny like the ones Don Ho sang about, and they don’t make me feel warm and fuzzy either. They’re great big bubbles that make me pop….

While the Obama’a administration touted the news of the largest class-action payoff since the $350 billion tobacco settlement, I say the payoffs by banks for their mortgage foreclosure fraud are the largest travesty of justice in history. The corks are popping and so are banker’s buttons over the feast they will celebrate tonight. See why […]

Apparently, experts never learn. Larry Summers writes: “The central irony of financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much borrowing and lending and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more borrowing and lending, and more spending.” (The Financial Post) What he really means is […]