The Great Recession Blog

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 […]

Market permabulls die because they act like pigs, obsessed with pushing their way into the trough for any scrap of food that remains. For example, people continue to invest in stocks as they face-plant into the hog’s wallow again and again because they can only think of making money the way they have been used […]

You cannot grow a turnip in a pile of dollar bills unless you let them rot first. Depending on the road the Fed takes, that could become the dollar’s highest value and the best the Fed can do to reduce food shortages. Whether the dollar decays depends, in good part, on whether the Fed chooses […]

I want you to read one average person’s year-end description of the changes in our socio-economic landscape we experienced in 2020 because his words build toward a devastating realization at the end: The movement back to the farm has grown stronger … until today it is almost an exodus from the city to the farm…. […]

I’ve missed a few predictions along the way, but usually only in part. When I missed, it was because I took the bad too far. The bad has almost always happened exactly when I said it would but hasn’t always been as bad as I said it would be. Now, it has all arrived and […]

The longer US unemployment rises due to our response to coronavirus, the greater our depression, whether mental or economic, even to the point of another Great Depression. Suicides increased during the Great Depression. Suicide mortality peaked with unemployment, in the most recessionary years. The great despair of the Great Depression and increased suicide rates were due […]

U.S. first-quarter GDP plunged profoundly negative, but real GDP would have crashed even harder if not for bogus BEA data revisions. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the U.S. economy contracted 4.8% annually in the March quarter. Stocks soared on the news for two apparent reasons. First, many media outlets immediately reported the number as +4.8% […]

Four years after the following lead-in article to my Epocalypse series was written, it is coming true before your eyes. Some of it came true right after it was written. Most is happening now. You can see the events it describes overtaking us in all the ways it laid out, and you can go back […]

Monday was nothing but a dead-bull bounce … after bounce … after bounce, which means there is plenty of punishment to come. Pure testosterone drove the market’s rise, fed by nothing but the weak premise that New York’s drop in the coronavirus death rate for a single night meant the worst is behind us.

The US debt ceiling is likely about to be lifted. When it is, it will release a deluge of government debt issuance that has backed up for four months. That could cause a temporary spike in bond yields as so much debt rushes out to find buyers. That has sometimes happened at such junctures in […]

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.

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, […]