The Great Recession Blog

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 […]

Only a couple of weeks ago, I said we were entering the jaws of the Epocalypse. Now we are sliding rapidly down the great beast’s throat toward its cavernous belly. The biggest economic collapse the world has ever seen is consuming everything — all commodities, all industries, all national economies, all monetary systems, and eventually all peace and […]

[The following review is by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform. I came across it after writing an article about American greed. I thought it makes an excellent companion piece to that article because the themes depicted in the movie and described here are the themes I was writing about.]   The Big Short opens nationwide […]

It’s a good question to ask on the day after Christmas, when we have all used our credit cards to buy gifts for others. In spite of this seasonal gift buying, I think there has never been a more selfish generation. (Regular readers of this blog are excepted because you wouldn’t be reading this contrarian blog if you were […]

The main reason this depression is being talked about now as a “second recession” is that the governments of this world propped up the initial phase of this global depression with all the cash they could manufacture — more cash than has ever been pumped into the U.S. economy at any time in history. Thus, […]

The U.S. government says the recession ended in June of 2009. The economic gurus of our time parrot this proclamation in complete belief, but how has that recession ended when the unemployment that it caused never improved for those who lost their jobs? How is it that the experts and government officials ALL say the […]

We’ve all heard the plan for saving the nation. Create a “Bad Bank.” Deposit all the bad loans in the nation into the bad bank, and flush them away. The bad bank will buy these loans with money that is minty fresh This magic money will come from the next generation. Our legacy to them […]