Archive for February, 2020

It’s a Bloodbath, and There’s a Toaster in the Bathwater

Posted February 28, 2020 By David Haggith
Daily economic news

It just can’t get bad enough, and I can ‘t write fast enough. The headlines at the end of the week are now stunning, so I’m going to share several of them along with some quotations from the bawling and dying market bulls. In just one week, this has become the fastest stock market plunge […]

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The Great Melt-up Melt Down

Posted February 27, 2020 By David Haggith

That didn’t take long. Just a month ago, I wrote, “Stock Market More Overpriced and Perilous Than Anytime in History,” stating that the market was poised for a big fall because “some of the market’s most fundamental valuation metrics are now printing at levels never seen before…. This market is tripping on some pricy hallucinogens.” […]

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COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Economic Impact Sweeps Down on Global Economy Like a Fat Black Swan

Posted February 24, 2020 By David Haggith

It is the senseless things of this world that sometimes knock sense into the high and mighty whose hubris causes them to believe they cannot fall. In this case, the tiny COVID-19 virus (coronavirus) is bringing down a global house of cards long perched to fall — locks, stocks, and barrels of oil.

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The True Danger of Coronavirus (COVID-19): What are the real risks of infection, death and a global pandemic?

Posted February 23, 2020 By David Haggith
Mers coronavirus. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH) / Public domain

The public is always ready to panic over the next pandemic. We love a good movie like the old Ebola scare, Outbreak. We even have a name for the next mystery disease — the big one that is supposed to destroy us all like World War III or like the apocalypse — a scientific name. […]

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The Glub, Glub, Glub of Recession Circling the Drain

Posted February 21, 2020 By David Haggith
How's that swamp drainage project going?

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 […]

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What to Make of the Bureau of Lying Statistics’ Contradicting Jobs Reports

Posted February 16, 2020 By David Haggith

Employment has been the one stickler in my recession prediction for 2019, and finding a trustworthy measurement from the government’s statistics is like finding a virgin in a brothel. Depending on which official figures you look at, employment has refused to fall and new jobs are strong … or they stink.

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Federal Reserve Monetizing US Debt Faster than its Previous Tightening

Posted February 15, 2020 By David Haggith

During its brief and utterly failed attempt to reduce its balance sheet (called quantitative tightening), the Federal Reserve only rolled off securities at a rate of $50 billion a month. It is now purchasing US treasuries at a rate of more than $55 billion a month:

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The Recession Called “Repocalypse”

Posted February 11, 2020 By David Haggith
John Robert Charlton [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

There is, at least, one highly recognized economist who agrees with me that a recession started forming in the summer of 2019 and is still emerging, in spite of the Fed’s strongest efforts to stop it — David Rosenberg: We recall all too well the euphoria that followed the early 2001 and late 2007 Fed […]

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As goes the Iowa caucus, so goes any government led by Democrats

Posted February 9, 2020 By David Haggith
Zombie economists bring on US 2016 recession. (Photo by Charlie Llewellin (Flickr: Occupy Austin) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Dems will process you like a Cuisinart. Demonizing Democrats and reviling Republicans is as easy as shooting fish in a gun barrel. Democrats are so addicted to process, they can’t get anything done because they spend twenty years arguing about what to do, rather than doing it. That’s why they have caucuses, instead of primaries. […]

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Sizing up the 2017-2020 Housing Cliff Hanger

Posted February 8, 2020 By David Haggith
A housing market crash in 2018 is where we start 2019

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 […]

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GDP is In, and Recession is Out … or is it?

Posted February 3, 2020 By David Haggith

Having predicted last year that a recession would begin in the summer of 2019 and that it would likely start with a major repo crisis, I am now proven wrong by 2019’s fourth-quarter GDP. If the repo crisis that started in the final week of summer had actually been the start of a recession, we […]

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