The Great Recession Blog

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. April closed as the best month for the US stock market since the V-shaped recovery that followed the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987. April also delivered the deepest, broadest economic collapse of any month in history.

Four years after the following lead-in article to my Epocalypse series was written, it is coming true before your eyes. Some of it came true right after it was written. Most is happening now. You can see the events it describes overtaking us in all the ways it laid out, and you can go back […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

Consider this a travelogue in pictures (graphs and charts really) that presents a rather striking and comprehensive image of a nation journeying into recession. Our decline is steeper now than it was even in my retelling of economic turns during the summer and early fall.

The leaves are turning quickly now, and so is housing … down … like autumn’s leaves. Earlier this month, I wrote of how housing sales had started to float upward against my call for a long housing decline more than a year prior, but that turned out to be a mere swirl in the wind:

“Show me the data,” demand those who cannot see a recession forming all around them and who keep parroting what they are told about the economy being strong because it is what they want to believe; yet, the data look like an endless march through a long summer down the road to recession.

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.

A journey in photos and facts to compare the present Great Recession with the past Great Depression to gain perspective on where we might be headed.

News of significant recessionary drops in the US became as relentless this past week as the ping, ping, pang of drips from a leaking ceiling hitting pans in the New York Stock Exchange. I’ve been saying you would hear the sounds of recession everywhere as soon as the second-quarter earnings reporting season began this summer. […]

First, a decline in manufacturing, and then a slump in service industries, now a broad-spectrum inversion of the yield curve hitting its most critical metric this week, unemployment finally starting to rise again, a one-year relentless housing decline across most of the nation and the world, carmageddon pressing car dealers to offer big incentives once […]