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Recession Ledger

An independent record of the downturn that began in 2008 and the years after it. Every forecast here is dated, and checked at the foot of its page.

Subject

Banks and money

Bank failures, bail-ins, the war on cash and the digital dollar.

Two subjects that turn out to be one. The essays on bank crises, from Austria and Italy in 2016 to Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, sit beside the essays on the cashless society and central bank digital currency, because every crisis in the first set was used as an argument for the second.

The record here runs from 2016 to 2023 and is, on the digital-money side, the most complete on the site.

8 essays, 2016–2026

20261 essay

  1. When the bank says no: what a downturn does to the smallest firms' credit, and who answers

20231 essay

  1. What a day: the 'non-systemic' collapse deepened systemically as the Fed's balance sheet jumped with 'not-QE'

20222 essays

  1. Cashless-society talk goes mainstream in a hurry, and should be trusted about as far as the NSA

  2. The money of the apocalypse: the New York Fed's digital-dollar pilot, announced the week FTX collapsed

20202 essays

  1. Cashless society 2020: how the coronavirus swung the public toward touch-free money, digital ID and a digital dollar

  2. Digital ID, vaccination certificates and the cashless argument: what was actually proposed in 2020

20162 essays

  1. What was going on with banks in April 2016: emergency meetings, a bail-in and the worst quarter since 2009

  2. The cashless-society war intensifies: the record of 2015 and 2016, country by country