The Great Recession Blog

The Big Bear is back. Ursa Major is in the house of the rising sun, and Taurus is in the house of the setting sun. Those are bad signs for investors who are now daily diving into their horoscopes. The market is pouring out of an inverted Big Dipper, otherwise known as the Big Bear […]

First I said I believed the US stock market would plunge in January, but I also said that January would not be the biggest drop, but just the first plunge that begins a global economic collapse: the big trouble for the economy and the stock market, I said, would show up in “early summer.” That’s when the […]

Europe’s many fault lines are spreading once again, bringing the endless euro crisis saga back in 3-D realism. Italy gained a new anti-establishment government last week, even as Spain elected a new Socialista government that could crack Catalonia off from the rest of Spain. All of Europe fell under Trumpian trade-war sanctions and threatened their own retaliation. […]

I’m pretty sure the nation’s favorite groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, knows more about the weather than he does about markets, and I’m not all that sure he knows anything about the weather! In fact, I don’t understand the underground methods of this rodent resident of Gobbler’s Knob at all. It would seem to me that sighting […]

Headwinds that are starting to assail deep structural flaws in the US and global economies form the basis for my 2017 economic forecast, which looks like an all-out economic crisis building throughout the world. Some of these headwinds are global; some more locally focused within the United States, but that which brings down the US economy wounds the world anyway. […]

While I haven’t had the privilege of divine revelation, I do try to look at the forces that are in play that have the power to move nations economically. Two dominant countervailing forces right now are those who have George Soros nearly in tears — who make up the anti-global revolution — and then all the globalists like Soros […]

Europeans must have been delighted to discover that one thing is working as well as it has since the start of the Great Recession. Behemoth banks that are failing are still able to pay their Christmas bonuses to their top executives and give nice dividends to their shareholders thanks to Super Mario Draghi.

Since Trump’s election, the US stock market has climbed unstoppably along a remarkably steep path to round off at a teetering height. Is this the irrational exuberance that typically marks the last push before a perilous plunge, or is the market reaching escape velocity from the relentless gravity of the Great Recession?

Nothing is more shameless in a bedazzling sort of way than rich banksters standing on the public curb with their hands out. First, we had the admission this past week by a major French bank that Italian banks are so sick (and so too big to fail) they could cause systemic banking failure throughout Europe if not bailed out […]

Brexit — the second major landslide in the Year of the Epocalypse — has bankers all over the world scrambling to pick up and prop up their crumbled facades this week. This is one more jolt in the developing global economic collapse that I predicted for 2016.

Only about a week ago, one reader scoffed at me because oil prices had stabilized (or so the market theory d’jour went). The big stock market crash I had predicted had run its course, he thought. The Saudis and Russia had entered a deal on oil, and Iran was coming on board; the stock market […]

The developing Epocalypse will become the super-volcano of economic history, and this week revealed cracks in the surface that give hints of the eruption to come. It was a week of crumbling throughout global stock markets that has challenged records. Thursday, Hong Kong stocks suffered their worst start of a Chinese New Year since 1994 in […]