The Great Recession Blog

My economic vision for a sustainable economic recovery is easy to understand, easy to believe in and almost impossible to enact politically. I’ve laid it out in bullet points throughout the article below:   Banks that failed would be allowed to fail, so the bad stuff dies and decays back into the fetid earth, and the evil and greedy are […]

Yes, the economic headwinds all over the world are growing, and a subconscious awareness is spreading that there is no recovery. It is now starting to look like the stock market is banging its head on a glass ceiling. Consider just the events of this past week:   Stock market collapse seen in second correction?   What? […]

Was the recovery of the stock market rigged? David Stockton, President Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, says it was:   The markets plunged on a vague recognition that the central bank promoted recovery story might not be on the level. But that tremor didn’t last long. Right on cue the next day, one of the very dimmest Fed heads – James […]

When Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen worries about growing wealth inequality in America, I wonder if she’s truly unaware of how she creates this disparity. All of the Fed’s efforts at economic recovery have been directly applied toward helping the America’s most wealthy recover first. How can you not create greater wealth inequality in America when the recovery program for the Great Recession […]

The Central Bank of Ireland is launching a â‚¬1 million campaign to create a cashless society in Ireland. The Central Bank on Dublin’s Dame Street is hoping to persuade all of the Irish to surrender their cash forever, and they’re using the current Irish economic troubles as a ripe opportunity to turn that corner on cash. […]

Let’s look at some simple facts about how much improvement Obamanomics has given us in the job market after five years. The number of Americans who are capable of work but have chosen not to work has risen from 80,507,000 to 90,609,000, the first time it has ever topped ninety million. Ten million more people […]

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke merely hinted that the Fed MIGHT START to TAPER its quantitative easing MONTHS from now, and that breath sent mortgage rates soaring in one of the steepest rates of rise the U.S. has seen. This confirms one of the primary themes of this blog in the starkest way possible:   […]

It’s time to assess my own 2012 economic predictions. In looking honestly at the shortcomings in my predictions, I see something interesting. The picture of events formed a ghost image to my own forecast. It shaped up weaker than I had predicted, and yet has taken the exact form I envisioned, albeit in paler colors […]

Watching the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, I found myself repeating something I’ve complained about for decades. I watched the tired story of millions of people living in dark because of power lines being whipped about in a storm. What a metaphor that is for how truly in-the-dark America has become. I listened to stories of […]

Anyone can criticize while having no better ideas.  In fact, I would argue that, if you cannot put forward reasonable alternatives, you might not be qualified to criticize those who are, at least, trying something. In that spirit, I want to scope out a new economic recovery program vastly different from the economic plan the U.S. adopted […]

To the Financial Editors and Reporters of this nation: One thing that defies sense to me is how nearly all of you have demonstrated an overwhelming tendency to write more optimistically about the economy than the facts deserve. I can understand why the government does it and to some extent why economists do it (in […]

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: […]