The Great Recession Blog

If the Eurozone’s leaders walked away from their summit thinking they had accomplished some bold plan that would start to solve their problems, they’d better get out some starting fluid to accelerate the start of their plan. Old political realities reappeared in economic news articles the next week like Hydra’s heads to bite off every […]

How long was it after Italy’s PM, Mario Monti announced that the euro crisis was “almost over” until it became a bigger crisis than ever? Within a month he found himself embroiled in the battle of his career against “Frau Nein,” Germany’s Chancellor Merkel, as the world watched the daily economic news articles out of […]

Greece came together and fell apart in the same week; Spain went into free-fall; Germany’s Merkel dithered as if she owns time, itself … all while U.S. politicians did nothing but complain and campaign. While politicians all over the world could not agree on solutions, many of the world’s largest banks were substantially downgraded.   […]

The euro crisis dominated economic news and set the stage for the summer I have been anticipating. Stocks fell; unemployment climbed; sales dragged; manufacturing sluffed off; consumer spending receded. Interest on the U.S. debt also ticked upward when the annual deficit soared over the trillion-dollar barrier for the fourth straight year. And that was just one week!     […]

Has anyone noticed the silence? Week after week the news screeches like relentless train wheels about the scurrying of European leaders in and out of meetings to resolve the latest failure of their efforts to round up their endless troubles. Yet, every week, at the same time,  you hear no sound of U.S. leaders scurrying […]

Bullheaded optimism presses on in the news. This week the Economic Times reported… “The bullish momentum on Wall Street extended Tuesday’s gains, when the Dow rose 0.2 percent, snapping a four-day losing streak.” Perhaps they mean the market is now “climbing at the speed of an ox cart.” It nearly crashed last week, completing the erasure of […]

At the start of last week, economists were feeling rosy. They thought housing was up, and the stock market was up after a long fall. They even thought the job market was doing better. Meanwhile, I continued to wonder why they continue to get paid. 

At the beginning of last week a big financial advisor proclaimed that the markets’ little downturn meant nothing. The market would go right back up. He was certain that Europe’s problems that week would quickly be yesterday’s worries. He gets paid too much to be that certain about that much and be that wrong. I […]

The news of the week centered on Europe where no one knows how to clean up the Greece stain that smears the euro image. Greece ironically elected Nazis to fight German austerity last week. France joined in the fight with a hard left-wing punch to Sarkozy, knocking him flat on his French derriere and replacing him with […]

The first and most notable thing I did while working on this website last week was laugh at the optimistic headlines I was posting. MSNBC reported, “New claims for unemployment benefits tumbled more than expected in the latest week, raising hopes that the job market remains on the mend.” NPR reported the same story this way: […]

Splintering sounds ruptured the euro zone as it, again, became the big leader in economic news last week. The prior week emitted a couple of loud cracks when Spanish bonds sailed to unsustainable heights. This past week the austerity pact, which was intended to stabilize those bond prices, became the new threat. Political instability broke […]

None of the many reversals of fortune in the past week’s economic news was unexpected by readers of The Great Recession Blog. So, stay tuned, and you’ll continue to read the headlines before they happen! In the meantime, here are the headlines after they happened with a little commentary to make sense of them: Last week’s summary […]