The Great Recession Blog

Before you read the following quote from a Fed employee, you had better set your coffee, beer or wine down so you don’t spray all over the carpet or the person next to you. This is how dense the Fed is when it comes to learning from its own mistakes after it first tried quantitative tightening in 2018 and failed miserably:

Since this is a long article packed with my predictions (and some near-predictions, so let’s say “high likelihoods”), you will probably want to read it in sections, which you’ll find cover my ongoing predictions about the following topics: To make it easier to get back to where you left off, I’ve made these targeted links […]

This was the year where it seemed everything imploded. For the economy, it started with two quarters of receding GDP that everyone refused to call a recession. Whether you stand with the crowd on that or not, it was certainly not a good change and was certainly a collapse of the economy toward a smaller […]

This was the year where it seemed everything imploded. For the economy, it started with two quarters of receding GDP that everyone refused to call a recession. Whether you stand with the crowd on that or not, it was certainly not a good change and is certainly a collapse of the economy toward a smaller […]

The languishing labor market has been the Fed’s path to peril, as I wrote yesterday in assessing how the Fed’s latest moves were perfectly predictable. I tried over the past year to lay out each step the Fed and the stock market would take together, and they followed those stepping stones like the Yellow Brick […]

Stocks soared at the tiny dip in inflation as if they had just been given aviation fuel. And then they didn’t. The climb quickly stalled and sailed back toward the ground with stocks ending modestly up. Look into today’s CPI numbers and even think about the headline for more than a flash, and it’s obvious […]

The Federal Reserve – and central banks the world over – played a crucial role in making lockdowns possible and weaponizing the panic of politicians. As the lender of last resort and the provider of liquidity for the entire federal government, it removes normal fiscal restraint. It writes checks that cannot bounce to fuel governments in […]

On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), inflated at an annual rate of 7.7 percent in October.  Investors went bananas on this apparent pullback in the headline CPI…

The vast herd of investors are a deluded crowd.  Following the Federal Reserve’s much anticipated 75 basis point rate hike on Wednesday the major stock market indexes jumped upward. Then they fell. Now they’ve bolted back upward again. Their delirious….

I’m going to write today’s article with all the vicissitudes I experienced as I read Powell’s statements about the Fed’s predicted moves and watched the market’s responses as they played out. My first thought, as I read the headline about Powell stating outright that the time was coming when the Fed would have to slow […]

The stock market is smart in a dumb way, but it is currently unbelievably dumb in the way that it is smart. To understand that, you have to realize that today’s stock market is not a place for investing in businesses. It used to be that, but the players have all turned it into a […]

The sails are torn and fluttering fiercely like flags in a windstorm. The ship has stopped slicing through the waves, and its timbers are shuddering on the rocks. You can hear the stony teeth chewing into her planks, but the captain and crew are passing around sherry glasses and raising a toast to the fine […]