The Great Recession Blog

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 […]

The US debt ceiling is likely about to be lifted. When it is, it will release a deluge of government debt issuance that has backed up for four months. That could cause a temporary spike in bond yields as so much debt rushes out to find buyers. That has sometimes happened at such junctures in […]

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.

The US deficit this year is already over three-quarters of a trillion dollars, putting the first eight months of the fiscal year almost equal with the entire past fiscal year. It is also $200 billion above the previous record for this portion of the year, and this May’s deficit alone was 40% higher than last […]

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 […]

In my first Premium Post back in January, “2019 Economic Headwinds Look Like Storm of the Century,” I laid out sixteen major headwinds that would be howling against the economy this year. One of those was the government debt, which I said was about to skyrocket: If you thought the government deficit exploded last year […]

While this is not an article about the US national debt, one cannot comprehend the overall scale of US debt crisis without also including the world’s largest elephant in the room. Here stands the largest debt the world has ever known, growing faster than any debt has ever grown. It dwarfs the entire combined value […]

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 […]

2018 was the year Wall Street was wrong about everything. You can trust your stock broker if you want, but 2018 doesn’t give much confidence in her ability to stop talking her book and start talking straight. However, this overview of global economic headwinds — greater in number and more severe than I can ever […]

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.

While glowing presidential proclamations about US GDP growth last week did nothing to prevent the stock market from rushing headlong over the cusps of a FAANG stock ledge, the market is taking a breather today. So, let’s take a breather and go back and look at why that GDP report had no bite.

Is the US economy collapsing into the Epocalypse that I predicted would start to show up as large cracks in the economy last summer? The initial damage that I forecast for last summer was in auto sales, housing sales, and the ruin of retail stores and shopping malls along with their satellite restaurants. These initial breakups, […]