The Great Recession

As soon as President Trump put his Goldman boys, Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, in charge of his tax plan, I knew Trump’s tax plan would never fulfill his and his henchmen’s promises of helping the middle class and of not giving additional tax breaks to the rich. The Trump Tax plan, as it now exists, proves those conjoined promises to be the greatest lie Trump ever told.

After two decades with Goldman Sachs, Munchkin (as he shall hereinafter be known for he lives on the Goldman-bricked road) bought his own bank, IndyMac. He renamed it OneWest and turned it into a mega repo machine in 2009, whirring out hyuuge amounts of crash cash during the Great Recession. Continue reading “Trump Tax Plan Greatest Gift Establishment Ever Got”

The Great Recession

The Trump Rally pushed ahead relentlessly through a summer full of high omens and great disasters, all which it swatted off like flies. Even so, all was not perfect in the market as nerves began to jitter midsummer beneath the surface even among the most longtime bulls. Wall Street’s fear gauge (the CBOE Volatility Index) lifted its needle off its lower post to a nine-month high after President Trump’s comments about “fire and fury” if North Korea didn’t toe the line. (Mind you, the high wasn’t very far off the post because of how placid the previous nine months had been.)   Continue reading “Stock and Awe, Bears in Bondage”

The Great Recession

Is the Federal Reserve’s Great Unwind already coming unwound? I thought it would be good to check up on Federal Reserve balance sheet reduction since the Fed is supposed to be up and running on the move out of quantitative easing this month. It should be fascinating to see what progress the Fed is making as it happily applauds its own successful recovery.   Continue reading “Federal Reserve Hesitates on QE Unwind / Balance Sheet Reduction”

The Great Recession

In a nutshell, here is a graph that summarizes everything you need to know about the unsustainable US economy. Unless you’re in the top ten percent of income producers in the nation — or, at least, living in their neighborhood — you are living in a dingy bedroom economy that has only seen its net worth decline since the Great Recession began. Those who are in the top ten percent, on the other hand, profited astronomically from the Great Recession. It’s the best thing that ever happened to them, and you helped them do it with tax-backed or even tax-funded bailouts and by allowing them a perpetual cycle of savings on their capital gains.   Continue reading “Here’s You and Here’s the Top Ten Percent”

The Great Recession

While David Stockman stated early this year with resolute certainty that the debt ceiling debate would blow congress up and send the nation reeling over the financial precipice, I avoided jumping on the debt-ceiling bandwagon. While I was convinced major rifts in the economy would start to show up in the summer, I was not convinced they would have anything to do with the debt ceiling debate. If there is anything you can be certain of this in endless recovery-mode economy, it is that the US will just keep pushing its bags of bonds up a hill until it can finally push no more. So, I figured another punt down the road was more likely.   Continue reading “Yawning Debt Trap Proves the Great Recession is Still On”

The Great Recession

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says President Donald Trump wants him to push forward on diplomacy with North Korea “until the first bomb drops.” (Bloomberg)

Brilliant! That means until the first entire city is destroyed. At least, that is what it could easily prove to mean … unless he means until the US drops its first bomb.   Continue reading “Nuclear Stupidity: Tillerson Says Diplomacy Continues Till First Bomb Drops”

The Great Recession

It was a summer fit for the start of the Epocalypse followed by a fall where every event leans into Halloween. Summer began with a total solar eclipse that cast a long shadow across the nation from sea to shining sea, and fall began with hurricanes, mass bloodshed and fire. And through it all, the stock market barely blinked.   Continue reading “US Stock Market Whistles Past the Graveyard”

The Great Recession

In fact, I knew what the economy did last summer before summer even began. Since the beginning of the year, I have been writing that it appeared housing was reaching a new bubblicious peak and that the real estate market was getting ready to roll over. Just before the start of the summer, I confirmed that prediction by saying that it looked like that process had begun. I anticipate it will be a slow turnover at first, just as it was in 2007, which did not reach free fall until late in 2008. Likewise, I anticipate the present decline will not reach free fall until 2018.   Continue reading “I Know What the Economy Did Last Summer Part 2: The Real Estate Rollover”

The Great Recession

Summer closed in a whirlwind of weather chaos for the United States and its territories. At the start of the summer, the US economy began to show signs that it was flying apart. The two most obvious were the big blowouts in the auto industry and in retail, not all of which could be attributed to a shift to online sales.   Continue reading “I Know What the Economy Did Last Summer Part 1 : Carmageddon and the Retail Apocalypse”

The Great Recession Blog

It is widely believed that World War II gave us the end of the Great Depression. As a result, people have said for decades there is nothing like a wartime economy to bring recovery from economic recession. War blows apart a lot of things, so you have to make a lot of things, which puts a lot of people to work building a lot of things, which puts a lot of other people to work digging a lot of things from the ground in order to build those things. Hurricanes blow apart a lot of things, too.

If that logic held completely true, however, the best thing we could do whenever we are trying to come out of economic collapse would be to blow up every city in the nation so we could build it all over again. While WWII did end the Great Depression, logic tells us there is a more complex tale to tell.   Continue reading “Hurricanes Harvey and Irma May Lend Helping Hand to Economy, but Hurricane Iniki and Katrina Tell More Complex Longterm Tales”

The Great Recession

The establishment has eaten the White House, and yet I continue to read supporters of President Trump who desperately hold to the delusion that Trump  is playing a game of 4-D chess — a game so advanced that no one else on the face of the earth can understand that Trump is winning.

Trump’s masterful chess moves supposedly convince his opponents he is losing at every turn, but these apparent losses are mere decoys, intended to distract his opponents from his true accomplishments and, most of all, from seeing the great drubbing they are about to receive … though no one knows what that is. Even the removal of Steve Bannon is being touted by a few Trump supporters as a strategically brilliant covert play.   Continue reading “Team Trump Transmogrifies into the Swamp Thing”

NPR – by Chris Arnold

The Trump administration on Wednesday will start to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. And despite very tough talk about NAFTA during the campaign, it appears the administration has backed away from a major assault on the decades-old trade deal.

And that is a relief to businesses in all three countries.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump clearly tapped into frustration about workers who had lost jobs in manufacturing. And he painted NAFTA as one of the central villains responsible for stealing Americans jobs.   Continue reading “Trump’s NAFTA Makeover Not So Extreme”

The Great Recession

August is a sultry month for stocks as markets thin out during the dog days of summer. Everyone leaves investing for a break from the heat. Statistically, August is the worst month for overall stock performance, while September delivers more of whatever August sends its way or brings its own dark surprises. After that, October loves a surprise and is the worst for having the most major crashes.

As markets now slide into their toughest time of the year, they also also face a major war of words that may quickly become more than words. The days of market calm appear now to have ended. $500 billion worth of supposed US market “value” just cascaded into oblivion last week. (Over a trillion worldwide. Of course, it could reappear tomorrow.)   Continue reading “Wars and Rumors of Wars: Fire and Fury Signifying Nothing?”

The Great Recession

The 1929 stock market crash became the benchmark to which all other market crashes have been compared. The following graphs of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, the dot-com crash, and the stock market crash during the Great Recession show several interesting similarities in the anatomy of the world’s greatest financial train wrecks. They also show some surprises that run against the way many people think of these most infamous of crashes.   Continue reading “Graphic Anatomy of a Stock Market Crash: 1929 stock market crash, dot-com, and Great Recession”

The Great Recession

One reason I started my own economics blog was because of how tired I was of reading government-regurgitated half truths about the economy. Nothing has changed. As Newsmax and other publications report this week that July was a bumper month for lower-wage earners, I continue to have to sift for myself through all the glitter to find the globs of buried ugly truths. First, the DayGlo report:   Continue reading “Continue to Beware the Job Numbers (Is it the Bureau of Labor Statistics or Bureau of Lying Statistics?)”

The Great Recession

With 60% of stocks now being traded by bots that fake each other out in order to create buying opportunities, stock exchanges have lost their connection to the reason markets are created in the first place. The exchanges no longer exist as places for people to buy and sell ownership in a corporation. They exist simply as the neural junctions of a conglomerated machine that plays tricks on itself, and your sole goal is no longer to invest, but to put money in the slot machine that is the quickest trickster.   Continue reading “Machine Mania in the Marketplace: How Computers Came to Own the World”

The Great Recession

The Great Recession was so great for the only people who matter that it is time to do it all again. Time to shed those bulky new regulations that are like clod-hoppers on our heals and dance the light fantastic with your friendly bankster. Shed the encumbrances and get ready for the new roaring twenties.

The banks need to be able to entice more people into debt because potential borrowers with good credit and easy access to financing are showing no interest in taking the banks’ current enticements toward greater debt. That could indicate the average person is smarter than the banks and apparently recognizes they are at their peak comfort levels with debt. The banks, on the other hand, want to reduce capital-reserve requirements in order to leverage up more.   Continue reading “Bank Deregulation Back in Vogue: It’s time to dance the last fandango!”