The Great Recession Blog

First, a decline in manufacturing, and then a slump in service industries, now a broad-spectrum inversion of the yield curve hitting its most critical metric this week, unemployment finally starting to rise again, a one-year relentless housing decline across most of the nation and the world, carmageddon pressing car dealers to offer big incentives once […]

All is well in the wonderful Land of Oz. Munchkin had that same dopy-faced, thumbs-up look when he was drifting on his plastic bubble bed in a languid pool back in December somewhere in the Carribbean after assuring the world via Treasurer’s tweet that he had called all the major US banks to make sure they […]

…when the stock market’s decade-long bottom trend becomes its new top trend and then it can’t even make it back up to that line as a top trend.

The graph here shows the point at which I said early last summer housing sales had turned over (for the worst) and would remain on a downtrend indefinitely, and it shows how that prediction has panned out. Existing home sales were down again nationally (4.4%) in April (fourteenth month in a row of declining sales […]

A crash course by Jeffry Gundlach and Danielle DiMartino Booth on the cognitive dissonance in economic thinking, the fact-free euphoria in the stock market, bonds busting out toward a breaking point, the falsehood in GDP versus real GDP, and the guaranteed crash trajectory of the US national debt — all the same stuff I’ve been […]

So much for the trade war being “good and easy to win.” Let’s be honest. Trump has been grinding away on it for almost a year now, and China has barely flinched in its negotiations. On Friday the tariff war became personal because it will now tap your own budget and every business budget in […]

We live in a time of intense scrutiny and declining trust in public institutions around the world. At the Fed, we are committed to working hard to build and sustain the public’s trust. The Fed has special responsibilities in this regard. Our monetary policy independence allows us to serve the public without regard to short-term […]

Socialism is the price Capitalism pays for unrestrained and unpunished greed, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the new face of Socialism in America. AOC refers to her Socialist revolution — for now wrapped up in the Green New Deal before congress — as the “politics of optimism,” and so it is. That’s because Socialism is the […]

In my last article, “The Bears Have it Right: Economy went Polar Opposite of Bullish Predictions,” I laid out my first prediction for 2019 — a recession by summer. I don’t want the following revelations and facts that I have since come across to get lost in comments I recently posted to that article, so […]

Bears, like myself, picked the meat off market bulls throughout 2018. We scoffed at the start of the year when bulls concocted a narrative that said bears would starve because 2018 was going to be the year of “global synchronize growth.” We bears bawled that this was euphoric nonsense. Global economies fell off a cliff […]

We now know that the Retail Apocalypse took another trip downhill during the all-important holiday season. December reports show retail sales declined more in one month than they have since … the Great Recession. Notice what a common refrain that comparison has become. Retail Apocalypse snowballs downhill Retail sales dropped 1.2% month-over-month in December, the […]

As happened with the first housing market crash that began in 2007 but didn’t become widely recognized until mid-2008, the present housing crisis began exploding one story at a time last summer, and this blog was perhaps the first to state that summer’s change was the turning point from decades of ascent into a collapse […]