The Great Recession Blog

2018 was the year Wall Street was wrong about everything. You can trust your stock broker if you want, but 2018 doesn’t give much confidence in her ability to stop talking her book and start talking straight. However, this overview of global economic headwinds — greater in number and more severe than I can ever […]

Make no mistake about it, there’s real fear and panic out there as markets are dislocating to the downside…. But note that on many charts we are showing 2008/2009 like conditions, something that is entirely inconsistent with the earnings and economic data we’re still seeing: It’s almost as if markets are pricing in a financial […]

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.

Europe’s many fault lines are spreading once again, bringing the endless euro crisis saga back in 3-D realism. Italy gained a new anti-establishment government last week, even as Spain elected a new Socialista government that could crack Catalonia off from the rest of Spain. All of Europe fell under Trumpian trade-war sanctions and threatened their own retaliation. […]

The global economy is now stranded as the central-bank tide runs out. By the end of this year, the collective monetary inflow from all the central banks of the world, which rose to a high-water mark of $2-trillion per year, will have ebbed to zero. After that, it runs net negative for years to come. […]

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 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 […]

I’m pretty sure the nation’s favorite groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, knows more about the weather than he does about markets, and I’m not all that sure he knows anything about the weather! In fact, I don’t understand the underground methods of this rodent resident of Gobbler’s Knob at all. It would seem to me that sighting […]

My 2018 economic predictions follow through on the accurate predictions I made in 2017. In my last article, I stated that I had bet my blog the stock market would crash by January 2018. That was my thinking back then based on where Obama had been taking us. In fact, however, when I went back […]

Is the Federal Reserve’s Great Unwind already coming unwound? I thought it would be good to check up on Federal Reserve balance sheet reduction since the Fed is supposed to be up and running on the move out of quantitative easing this month. It should be fascinating to see what progress the Fed is making […]

The Federal Reserve is telegraphing that it is going to begin its great unwind in September. It’s going to untie its own not untiable knot. In case you cannot untie what I just said, that’s a knot that cannot be untied. I’m writing the article to ask you to ponder this conundrum with me.

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 […]