The Great Recession Blog

When The Great Recession Blog was conceived back in early 2011, I wrote the following statement to my friend Stan who was thinking about developing a website of his own, which became the core theme for this site: I think focusing on the economy from the perspective of economic sustainability might be better. I don’t know if […]

I want to thank my patrons for hanging in there with me while my writing has been less frequent than you deserve. I’ve been battling with COVID for the past two weeks while also in the middle of a house move, but I hope now to get more on track as I seem to have […]

The past week has been a story of stagflation infecting the US economy while the stock market grimaces as Fed officials express the need to start a gradual pullout from economic stimulus much sooner or face a rapid pull-out a little later. Word on the Street has been that inflation is coming hot and heavy […]

While the Fed’s current tightening is not exactly a well-kept secret, stock and bond markets seem willing to ignore what the Fed’s left hand is taking away as the right hand is giving. Reverse repurchase agreements, which I have been tracking here, have exploded to a trillion dollars in money that the Fed is sucking […]

The Fed candidly admitted today’s soaring inflation is not what it had in mind, though it certainly is exactly what I’ve had in mind: At a news conference after the Fed’s statment [sic.] was released, Chairman Jerome Powell said he expects that inflation will be short-lived but acknowledged that it has run hotter than the […]

In one of my recent Patron Posts, I stated there was virtually no chance the Federal Reserve would be lowering interest rates below the zero bound. In spite of the massive economic damage we’ve seen from the coronavirus shutdown, that has so far remained true. The Fed has continued to say they don’t believe they […]

In the Weimar Republic, children played with stacks of money like building blocks, and people used wheelbarrows to move enough money to buy a small bag of groceries because the German government started printing as much money as it needed for whatever it thought it needed to do. With the Federal Reserve now cranking up […]

This week’s results in the Fed’s repo-market interventions in one fell swoop proved everything I’ve said about the Fed’s intervention being QE4ever and the problem’s cause. The following results show the repo market has been fixed: The instant the Fed returned to full-on, “we-now-call-it-QE” QE, the repo market settled right down to an easy calm.

The emphasis has to be on HOG as they squeal for corporate welfare and push their snouts into the trough. One hedge hog says the government needs to bail out all businesses by paying all wages so companies that depleted all cash don’t have to pay to retain all workers:

Today was the greatest crash in Wall Street history by one measure, and took down many other milestones. The Dow plunged 2,012 points in its largest single-session drop on record! Percentage-wise it was down 7.8%, which still knocked out decades of lows, leading to “Black Monday” being the hot search term on Google today as […]

That didn’t take long! After posting yesterday that the Fed would try to save the stock market with more rate cuts and more QE that wouldn’t work, the Fed overnight seriously upped the amperage on its QE repos. And it didn’t work spectacularly! That is to say, it was a total face plant in terms […]

It’s urgent time to pull together all the background layed about central banks and their plans for the future from the Patron Posts of the last year and put that together with the situation the Fed is in now based on articles written most recently from central bankers about what the Fed should do.