The Great Recession Blog

The Fed’s fight has become much more complex this month. Inflation is fighting back harder all of a sudden, while the US debt ceiling is putting bond markets and banks at considerable risk by driving bond yields up even faster than the Fed was doing. This extra thrust is happening just as the Fed was trying to end its rate increases and even as additional banks are poised to collapse from the already-high bond rates. The situation appears to be cascading into a nuclear market meltdown.

I was recently asked how on earth the Federal Reserve will get US citizens to convert to the purely digital currency the Fed has been talking about for a few years now. That’s a good question that I’ve dealt with a little in the past; and, since the Fed’s public rollout of its premier first step in that direction is scheduled for this July, now seems like a good time to recap all of that.

We are nearing the time in early summer when the entertainment industry rolls out its new blockbusters and flops. June is also that time when the Fed had said it will roll-out its own special feature (and likely future box-office flop) — the platform that will likely be used as part of its eventual central bank digital currency …

In just a single day last week, The Daily Doom ran three stories, hot in the financial headlines, from three different authors that prominently featured the term “doom loop.” I guess The Daily Doom was an aptly chosen name for the news we have today. Now, maybe that all started with Nobel Laureate Nouriel Roubini […]

Even though the Fed was specifically chartered to help protect the US from massive economic collapses like we experienced in The Great Depression and to protect banks from major bank runs like banks experienced in the Great Depression, the Fed never sees these things coming. Not only does it fail to see them coming even […]

We can now actually see with visual metrics what it looks like when the Fed keeps pushing against a badly broken job market that keeps pushing back. Because it doesn’t understand the broken labor market, the Fed is killing us.

Ever since last summer Zero Hedge has been pounding the “Fed pivot” fantasy as if it is going to happen — almost as if they want to entice the stupid stock market to keep chasing the fantasy. When it became obvious the Fed was steaming ahead with its inflation battle, ZH backed off a little….

Pull up a lawn chair to watch our head regulators get their butts chewed off by a congress that has let the Fed slide on regulation for years. In this grand game of CYA, the inquisitors tread artfully because they are as much responsible for oversight failures as the regulators.

The contagion of collapse continues. As I suggested would happen earlier this week, the crazy buyout engineered in Switzerland as one of the oldest banks on Earth collapsed has spread to equally ancient, gargantuan and zombified Deutsche Bank, and that’s just what’s happening on the surface as the whole global financial structure shook hard again today.

Back in the distant days of black-and-white television, when you had to get up periodically in the middle of your show to turn a little knob labeled “vertical hold” or another called “horizontal hold” to stop the flippin’ picture on the tube from rolling by, a fringy show called The Outer Limits …

The Fed, in consort with the FDIC and US Treasury, has created two new rescue programs that are rapidly inflating its balance sheet — the Bank Term Funding Program and a revised FDIC policy that covers all deposits at certain banks for any amount of money — sky is the limit — but only if […]

Just a handful of recent bank collapses with the help of Janet Yellen’s recent testimony in congress have spread shockwaves beneath the entire surface of global banking. Several publications are now joining in the harsh criticism I brought against Yellen …