The Great Recession Blog

With the S&P diving deeper into bear territory today, it solidly confirmed its status as a bear. While it entered the bear’s woods on Monday by closing at 21.8% down, it shoved its nose deeper into the dirt today like a rooting bear will do to affirm its new identity. The short-lived bull market that […]

We could all be on the cusp of the most deadly inflation the world has ever experienced, due to a unique setup of global forces that have the power to accelerate that into happening in a surprisingly short amount of time. I’m going to tell you how that could happen more quickly than anyone appears […]

That’s pretty ugly when you consider how ugly GDP looked at a growth rate (adjusted for inflation ) of -1.4%! Then that got kicked in the snout to -1.5%, but that’s not the half of how ugly it really was. What if it really was the first quarter of a covert recession? I am about […]

Retail was a bloody mess! But revenue looked pretty good … considering! So, what was all the red about, and why all the screaming on the stock exchange? Some of the biggest retail stocks got butchered after reporting higher revenue. Hold it! That doesn’t make sense. Why were corporate owners running out of their stores […]

During the Roaring Twenties would anyone have believed you if you told them about the depression and the dust-bowl years that were soon to come? Would they have believed their celebratory excesses during such a “strong economy” could possibly leave them collapsing into the dustbin of history that followed?

I still beg to differ with those who say the plunge from a positive 6.9% GDP growth rate in the last quarter of 2021 to minus 1.4% in the first quarter of 2022 is just noise. “It’s just a passing anomaly,” they say. On the contrary, I am certain the anomaly was the 6.9% reported […]

Sizzling inflation is not going away as drunken market revelers are hoping. This party bore, in fact, will be long outstaying her welcome. While the Fed once said it wanted some hot inflation on the scene, she arrived a lot hotter and has stayed a lot longer than Father Fed expected — now kind of […]

Market permabulls die because they act like pigs, obsessed with pushing their way into the trough for any scrap of food that remains. For example, people continue to invest in stocks as they face-plant into the hog’s wallow again and again because they can only think of making money the way they have been used […]

They say, “Beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes all the way to the bone.” Well, the last part of that certainly sums up this economy. It’s such a malformed monstrosity, you’ll wish it were extinct; and, at the rate this behemoth is now dying, it soon will be. You’ll have to look for […]

So said Barron’s as the Dow dove almost 1,000 points on Friday and completed its fourth down week in a row. The Dow’s dive (981 points) was the worst since the Coronacrash in 2020. In two day’s time, it has fallen over 1300 points. Even before the big polar-bear plunge, stocks were seeing their worst […]

So much has happened with the rise of inflation and so much is continuing to crowd in behind the scenes on the production end that I believe we will see inflation burning hotter for longer in the months ahead. Those saying we are nearing peak inflation are as wrong as they were when they said […]

The drumbeats of war are picking up the pace of inflation. Inflation, as I’ve argued here for some time, was certain to rise for months to come; but you’ll see in the various inflation notes below that sanctions made in response to the war are increasing inflation even more, as could be expected, and shortages […]