The Great Recession Blog

It wasn’t just the rise in the deficit that I had said was certain with the passage of the Trump tax plan and the spending bill, it was another one of those bad turns where you have to reach all the way back to the official part of the Great Recession to find a matching […]

How inflated with debt have we become? How long can we float on our own bloat? Reasonably trim in 1970, the sum of all debt publicly financed by the US government was $275 billion. Last week, the government sought to raise $258 billion in just one week! The weekly financing to keep the government afloat […]

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 […]

It took sixteen months to build the exceptionally steep Trump Rally, and just one week to eliminate a quarter of it. While I wouldn’t call that jolting reversal a stock-market crash in the ordinary sense, the largest one-day point fall in the history of the market (by far) certainly marks a massive change in market conditions. […]

The sweet grande dame of the central bankster world sees nothing but the brightest future to the furthest horizons for the markets she has been nurturing with her benevolent “wealth effect,” as one of her close colleagues called it. While Grandpa Greenspan routinely warns now that stock and bond markets are in bubbles, Grandma Yellen […]

My 2018 economic predictions in my last article laid out how I believe the stock market’s (and general economy’s) natural collapse will time out if no surprise event (black swan) knocks the wind out of it before it fails due to its own diminishing monetary lift from the Trump Tax Cuts. These predictions are based […]

As soon as President Trump put his Goldman boys, Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, in charge of his tax plan, I knew Trump’s tax plan would never fulfill his and his henchmen’s promises of helping the middle class and of not giving additional tax breaks to the rich. The Trump Tax plan, as it now exists, […]

While David Stockman stated early this year with resolute certainty that the debt ceiling debate would blow congress up and send the nation reeling over the financial precipice, I avoided jumping on the debt-ceiling bandwagon. While I was convinced major rifts in the economy would start to show up in the summer, I was not […]

It is widely believed that World War II gave us the end of the Great Depression. As a result, people have said for decades there is nothing like a wartime economy to bring recovery from economic recession. War blows apart a lot of things, so you have to make a lot of things, which puts […]

One of the kookiest moments last month came when Fed Chairwoman Yellen spoke about seeing no financial collapse in sight during our lifetimes   “Would I say there will never ever be another financial crisis? No. Probably that would be going a little too far, but I do think that we’re much safer, and I […]

Many of the 2017 economic headwinds I’ve described will hit during the Ides of March, just as the Trump stock-market rally shows signs of topping out. This might not be the Great Epocalypse — not all at once anyway — but a large and likely correction is looming. I think the bear is about to be let out of his cage.

Headwinds that are starting to assail deep structural flaws in the US and global economies form the basis for my 2017 economic forecast, which looks like an all-out economic crisis building throughout the world. Some of these headwinds are global; some more locally focused within the United States, but that which brings down the US economy wounds the world anyway. […]