The Great Recession Blog

The Federal Reserve is, at last, acknowledging at top levels that its economists are completely baffled, its recovery is failing, that the Fed cannot raise interest and may even have to heat up its stimulants … or we may end up with a permanently scarred and stagnant economy.

The Federal Reserve economic stimulus plan is edging toward the Twilight Zone now that the Fed sees its recovery about to be eaten by an economic apocalypse greater than its imagination could conceive. Though many think of central bankers as stogy and uncreative, the Fed has been quite creative when it comes to massive economic ideas that […]

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 […]

It was the second nuclear explosion, not the first, that ended World War II; and so it will be with the nuclear-sized economic disaster that first struck the earth in 2008. The second strike will be more calamitous and have greater consequence than the first, and that nuclear bomb is about to go off with a relatively […]

And it isn’t because of their fancy math or their impenetrable jargon or even their arrogance.   “We’re in a puzzling economy,” Shiller told Bloomberg TV.   The kindly professor sounded genuinely befuddled, which left me wondering how an economist can be puzzled as to why the economy isn’t working when its flaws are more obvious than […]

To divine the direction the world will take after global economic collapse, you have to understand the prevailing winds and the underlying tides. Look for the megatrends that are influences against which all other forces have minor affect. In predicting that global economic collapse would happen this fall, I pointed out the headwinds that would continue to grow in […]

It should be coming clear that economic recovery has evaded us. If you’re not seeing that just yet, your illusion of recovery will dissolve quickly this fall, just as I’ve said it would. Nothing the Federal Reserve has done has created recovery because it was never possible that such simplistic stimulus — made to appear […]

If you refuse to blame the Obama administration for the “economic recovery” pictured in these charts, then you’re just a Democrat protecting your own ideology. If, on the other hand, you refuse to blame the Republican congress, you’re just a Republican protecting your own ideology. Either way, you are part of the problem. You are […]

The one prediction I’ve made over the past years on this blog that came the closest to looking wrong has taken some time to gain perspective on. When I predicted the stock market would crash in the fall of 2014, it did take a big plunge, but it immediately spiked back up, so I couldn’t exactly call […]

Half a century ago I remember my mother, as she rolled dough on the kitchen table, listening to radio preachers who predicted that the entire would become a cashless society based on a biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation. Those preachers are now dead, as is my mother, but their predictions are coming to […]

The crack of dawn that would shine through economic denial has taken longer to come than I thought when I prognosticated that turbulence would begin last fall, which I said would cause people to realize there has been no recovery in our “economic recovery.” But here we are.   Citigroup now agrees: no recovery in our “economic recovery”   […]

There is one reason I’m posting again on my blog and that is that the Federal Reserve lied. The long-promised end of quantitative easing by the Fed last fall never happened, and, strangely, no one has called the Fed on that. I cry foul.   It was the end of quantitative easing in 2014 … not! […]