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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

The Fed

Quantitative easing, the yield curve, the balance sheet and the soft landing.

The Federal Reserve is the common cause in almost every essay on this site, which is not a conspiracy theory but a description of where the money came from. These pages explain what it did, in plain language, and record what its own officials said about it when they thought nobody was listening.

Start with the guide to quantitative easing if the mechanism is new to you.

6 essays, 2012โ€“2023

20231 essay

  1. Fedbucks coming to a theatre near you this summer: FedNow, the SVB editorial, and a catalogue of recent Fed flops

20222 essays

  1. Fed up and under-fed at the same time: tightening a labour market that is short of people

  2. The Federal Reserve crashes the plane en route to a soft landing

20171 essay

  1. Central banks buying stocks: how the Swiss and Japanese central banks came to own the American market

20161 essay

  1. A Fed official confesses: the Fed front-loaded the stock rally, and a correction is coming

20121 essay

  1. An idiot's guide to quantitative easing: what QE is, how it works, and why bad news became good news