The Great Recession Blog

As I’ve written about extensively, we know the Federal Reserve has painted itself into a corner where it is now pressured to start tapering its quantitative easing earlier than it had been indicating. Now we are seeing signs that the bond market isn’t liking the news out of the last FOMC meeting, which hinted strongly […]

Stagflation is showing up in data points and articles everywhere now. Delta worries, labor shortages and fading Washington stimulus — it’s enough to cast a chill on the U.S. economy this fall. A bevy of Wall Street forecasters chopped their targets for U.S. growth after a poor U.S. jobs report for August. The government on […]

When The Great Recession Blog was conceived back in early 2011, I wrote the following statement to my friend Stan who was thinking about developing a website of his own, which became the core theme for this site: I think focusing on the economy from the perspective of economic sustainability might be better. I don’t know if […]

While the Fed’s current tightening is not exactly a well-kept secret, stock and bond markets seem willing to ignore what the Fed’s left hand is taking away as the right hand is giving. Reverse repurchase agreements, which I have been tracking here, have exploded to a trillion dollars in money that the Fed is sucking […]

It wasn’t just COVID that got us down the road to ruin. Because many think we are in what looks like a post-apocalyptic world of rubble only because of COVID or because of Trump, I decided now would be a good time to summarize how predictably the Fed’s Great Recovery and Great Rewind got us […]

I rarely mention anytime I’ve been interviewed. However, I was reviewing a casual conversation I just finished with one of my readers, Bob Unger, and I thought Bob’s questions led to a well-rounded expression of how, over the past two years, our economy got to the collapse we are in now, how predictable the Federal […]

This week’s results in the Fed’s repo-market interventions in one fell swoop proved everything I’ve said about the Fed’s intervention being QE4ever and the problem’s cause. The following results show the repo market has been fixed: The instant the Fed returned to full-on, “we-now-call-it-QE” QE, the repo market settled right down to an easy calm.

The emphasis has to be on HOG as they squeal for corporate welfare and push their snouts into the trough. One hedge hog says the government needs to bail out all businesses by paying all wages so companies that depleted all cash don’t have to pay to retain all workers:

It’s urgent time to pull together all the background layed about central banks and their plans for the future from the Patron Posts of the last year and put that together with the situation the Fed is in now based on articles written most recently from central bankers about what the Fed should do.

During its brief and utterly failed attempt to reduce its balance sheet (called quantitative tightening), the Federal Reserve only rolled off securities at a rate of $50 billion a month. It is now purchasing US treasuries at a rate of more than $55 billion a month:

There is, at least, one highly recognized economist who agrees with me that a recession started forming in the summer of 2019 and is still emerging, in spite of the Fed’s strongest efforts to stop it — David Rosenberg: We recall all too well the euphoria that followed the early 2001 and late 2007 Fed […]

I’m not going to predict when and how the US stock market will crash as I did by laying out the stages of its fall for 2018. That was easy, but the times are different now. Back then, the Fed had laid out a precise schedule for its tightening, and it was apparent to me […]