The Great Recession Blog

The soup lines hadn’t formed yet. Jobs had not even noticeably started to dry up, but they weren’t as easy to find anymore. You had to be angry to quit without having a better job firmly in hand. Stocks were climbing furiously above an economy that had been slowly ebbing away since summer. Sales were […]

You can only be so dead, and that’s just “plain dead.” But there is also Feddy Krueger dead. The kind of dead that keeps on happening like a demonic death that won’t stay dead. It is in that nightmarish Elm St. light that I’m going to review the Federal Reserve’s death.

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.

A journey in photos and facts to compare the present Great Recession with the past Great Depression to gain perspective on where we might be headed.

The highest summit of irrational exuberance ever, which is not even seen by those engaging in it, establishes the perfect peak for the greatest global economic collapse ever. Some days the level of denial in the stock market twists my head into a knot — not because I am surprised at lemmings jumping over a cliff […]

I bet my blog on a stock market crash in the early summer and on global economic cracks large enough by summer that no one could reasonably deny the economy is in a serious downturn. I have both lost and won that bet as I will lay out here.

Economic cracks big enough to drive a car industry into are opening up all over the globe. Trade gaps are opening up between major allies. Widening spreads between the dollar and other currencies are shredding emerging markets. As we start into summer, these cracks and several others described below have become big enough to get […]

First I said I believed the US stock market would plunge in January, but I also said that January would not be the biggest drop, but just the first plunge that begins a global economic collapse: the big trouble for the economy and the stock market, I said, would show up in “early summer.” That’s when the […]

It’s simple math — an equal and opposite reaction. After a long spell of QE took mortgage interest down to the lowest it has ever been, a long spell of QT (quantitative tightening) is going to take it back up again. That’s why I forecasted another housing collapse with confidence last year: Rising mortgage rates will […]

Like the disintegration of the formerly charmed stock market, the return of Carmageddon is right on schedule. I had stated early last year that one of the first cracks in our economy to become evident would be the crash of the car industry. That crack materialized as promised, but then Hurricanes Harvey and Irma showed […]

Is the US economy collapsing into the Epocalypse that I predicted would start to show up as large cracks in the economy last summer? The initial damage that I forecast for last summer was in auto sales, housing sales, and the ruin of retail stores and shopping malls along with their satellite restaurants. These initial breakups, […]

The Federal Reserve is now hacking its own zombie recovery to death and eating it by reversing the actions it employed to create this artificially supported recovery. Each time the Fed unwinds its balance sheet, 10-year bond rates recoil, and the stock market dances along in countermoves and wild swings. The main theme of my […]