The Great Recession Blog

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Back in the oil-embargo recession of the early 70s when Boeing was Seattle’s economy and was laying off thousands of Seattleites, a billboard on the edge of town by Sea-Tac Airport read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn the lights out?” (Boeing had gone from 100,800 employees in 1967 to 38,690 in 1971.)

The best time to size up the collapse in housing that I called almost two years ago will be when it is over — so we can visualize its full extent. Since it is now over by some measures, though not by others, this might be as good as we get for awhile as a […]

Having predicted last year that a recession would begin in the summer of 2019 and that it would likely start with a major repo crisis, I am now proven wrong by 2019’s fourth-quarter GDP. If the repo crisis that started in the final week of summer had actually been the start of a recession, we […]

I’m not going to predict when and how the US stock market will crash as I did by laying out the stages of its fall for 2018. That was easy, but the times are different now. Back then, the Fed had laid out a precise schedule for its tightening, and it was apparent to me […]

Since hindsight is 2020, I thought it might be useful now that we are far past the time in 2018 when I called the fall of the US housing market to assess where its journey went during the year and a half that has gone by before I venture a housing market prediction for 2020.

Did you know Dr. Frankenstein created a monster that stays alive to this day by eating zombies? Neither did the zombies. Neither, apparently, did Dr. Frankenstein. In fact, the zombies, being braindead as zombies are, do not realize that they are also keeping alive the diabolical doctor who made the monster that is eating them.

This little monster that feeds beneath the surface of global banking at its core briefly raised one ugly eye out of the water as 2018 turned into 2019. I wrote back then that the interest spike we saw in the kind of overnight interbank lending known as repurchase agreements (repos) was just the foreshock of […]

Not-so-TruBlu97 was doing some of his typical cawing and provided the incentive for me, as we near the end of the year, to review the predictions I made for 2019, the most important one of which was locked within a Patron Post.

The Great Recession never ended. I say that because the deep economic flaws that caused it were never corrected. All recovery efforts since merely clouded our eyes to the problems growing larger around us, even making them worse, and now we are going back into the belly of the Great Recession.

Well, that didn’t take long! Four days ago, I stated the following in an article titled “Why are Bonds Going for Broke?“: Central banks are losing control, and are admitting they don’t even understand what is happening.

Pretty good if you ask me. Most economic indicators this year have moved relentlessly in the direction of recession, and now the Cass Freight Index is saying a US recession may start in the 3rd quarter, fitting up nicely to my prediction that we would be entering recession this summer.

Let’s take a look at how the average consumer is doing. I’ll call this typical consumer “Bubba” because I just read an article that claimed “Bubba’s doing better today than at any time since before the Korean War.” It disgusted me because I found it to be such a disingenuous set of lies wrapped in […]

On June 12, I wrote, The market is moving into waiting mode as the Fed’s next FOMC meeting where they have the opportunity to live up to the rate-cutting hopes they’ve raised come next week. As it does, it is forming that topping pattern that keeps repeating at this level. “Frothy Bubbles Make Me Whine“ […]